You can divide the history of Rush into different discrete eras - in fact, the band did a good job of this themselves by putting out a live album exactly every four studio albums, wrapping up their career into nice little leather-bound volumes of history that chronicled their change from a Zep Clone band on the Toronto bar circuit to the prog-rock juggernaut they became by the 1980s. But if you had to look at their album output and find the one album that signaled (no pun intended) their high-water mark, the place the trio of long-haired, polyester flare-pant wearing Tolkein lovers switched into a tech rock genre unto themselves, you’d have to say Moving Pictures.

Listening to their eighth? studio album today, almost thirty years later, it’s surprising to me this was produced in an era before digital recording, compact discs, widespread off-the-rack solid-state synths you could buy at the neighborhood Guitar World, and personal computers that could fit in a room and boot up without dimming the entire neighborhood’s lights, let alone fit thousands of MP3s on a tiny hard drive. It astounds me that even Rush’s own albums later in the decade pale in dynamic comparison to this disc. (Listen to this and Power Windows back-to-back; PW is cleaner, but to the point of sterility, with no feel whatsoever in the guitar. It sounds like Lifeson did away with mic’ing the Marshall stacks and fed his guitar through a DI box directly into the mixing board, with no effects whatsoever.) There’s incredible depth, full range, and a complete sonic experience here. It’s the kind of disc you bring to the store when you’re shopping for a new amp or speakers for your car, because you know in three minutes, you can hit every conceivable combination of notes in every type of range, from laid-back noodling to frenetic soloing to groovy prog-rock, with a solid low-end from Geddy Lee’s bass, and a gutsy midrange of Lifeson’s guitars over the top of it. Add to it a crystal-clear drum kit from the professor himself, and you’ve got a seven-song Maxell tape commercial, with everything but the crystal glass to shatter when you turn it up to 11.

This album isn’t about loud, and it isn’t about prog-metalling through every major and minor mode scale at the speed of light to let everyone know you can jerk off with your four or six string as well as they jerk off in their parents’ basements. It’s one of those ‘perfect storm’ moments that the band could record an album with more pop sensibilities than when they were trying to record AOR pop albums that charted, and yet they still managed to write things like the one prog-instrumental track (“YYZ”) that both carved the mold for every prog-rock band that wanted to record a complicated yet jamming instrumental track, as well as instructing a generation of music fans what the IATA three-character airport code for Toronto was. Every drummer that I’ve ever known that could play worth a damn went through a phase where they thought this was the greatest drum album ever recorded, and for good reason. Neil laid down absolutely perfect percussion here, including his innovative use of plywood, which is listed in his musical credits. (How do you play plywood? Wear gloves, hold it by the edges, and hit a metal chair sharply. It’s that bullwhip-meets-shattering-glass sound in “YYZ”.)

One thing that’s firmly gelled in this album is a lyrical sense that examines the 80s more than it examines comic-book scifi and the land of talking trees, magic elves, and twenty-minute epic concept songs. “Limelight” takes an honest look at a life of stardom and the road, in a more sincere way than your typical Motley Crue long-road-ahead-of-us-baby-baby sense of the theme. (It’s also helped by one of the most warm and emotion-piercing feedback-touched solo by Alex Lifeson, one that he claimed was his favorite ever, well after this was released.) “Witch Hunt” and “Red Barchetta” metaphotrically compare future fiction and possible past of Orwellian and MyCarthyist society, something everyone would be whining about in Reagan era new wave pop saturating the MTVs at the same time. Peart output a solid Humanist theme in the album’s lyrics, the kind of thing that works on multiple levels and opens up the band to a wider audience, even if the underlying musicianship of the band is still math-rock odd-meter and blindingly complex instrumentation.

Rush is and always will be a band of the Eighties. Yes, they’ve released many good albums in the nineties and beyond, and there was some pretty solid output in the seventies, too. But with the “one hit” track “Tom Sawyer”, the one song that much of the population equates with the Canadian Trio lands you right to this 1981 classic LP. And most of what I equate with Rush - the synthesizers, the electric drums, the high-tech recordings, the sound of my childhood and when I stopped listening to my parents’ Billy Joel records and started building my own musical identity, this all puts every Rush album as some extension of the Eighties. And if you’re looking at Test for Echo or Caress of Steel, you’re looking at some genetical precursor or successor of that one cornerstone album. Moving Pictures is that fly trapped in amber that will forever be used to carbon-date the crest of this movement in music.

There’s little I can say that’s bad about this album. I can still listen to it from start to finish, which is pretty much rule zero for good album-oriented rock. Maybe if I had to pick nits, I’d say “The Camera Eye” is a little bit repetitive and adds a side two lull that’s slow to pick up until “Witch Hunt” breaks out in its second half. And for the longest time, I held some sort of generic resentment toward the song “Tom Sawyer”, because so many people that didn’t like Rush liked that song, so naturally, I had to not like it, and would skip forward to “Red Barchetta”. But that faded, and not just because in the era of tape, it was such a pain in the ass to fast-forward past a song, and I eventually listened to this one from start to finish every time.

But “Red Barchetta” - perfect driving music. “Vital Signs” is the perfect mellow outro of a bookend for the tail of the album. “YYZ”, probably the greatest instrumental ever, at least in the rock world. The part of “Witch Hunt” that picks up from a slow dredge to a full blowout of rising energy still floors me every time I hear it. There’s so much thickness here, so much perfection, it’s hard to rate any other Rush album as being anything but an inferior product in comparison. It makes me feel old to pull the “they don’t make em like this anymore” shit. And it makes me even older to think about how much this transports me back to my teenage years, how much this album encapsulates the mid-1980s for me, and reminds me of every frustration and carefree moment of my early teens. But I just can’t think of another album that wraps it all up in a nice, seven-song package like this, which is why it easily gets a perfect rating.

Rating: 10

Dream Theater has never been known to show up at a gig, play the songs from the new album, throw in a few old numbers, and call it a night. Similar to Frank Zappa, they’ve always been known for having a large amount of material available to play at shows, and they’re known to mix things up a bit. That includes playing stuff that’s never been on an album before, including songs that will make it to disc in the future, and other bits that are just place-holders, or things that happen live just for the fans. Dream Theater is also a band that listens to fans, both in emails and from the mail that comes in to their fan club.

That’s where this EP came up. The guys were playing out this huge song called “A Change of Seasons,” a piece written for the album Awake, but at twenty-plus minutes, was considered too long by studio execs. Although the song was shelved, the band played it live several times, and it appeared on a few poorly-recorded bootlegs, becoming a thing of legend among DT fans. Tape traders and fan club members built up a fever pitch about the song, and when the band heard, they decided to go into the studio and record it properly for a release to EP.

The song itself is a seven-part, 23-minute epic, which alternates very skilled instrumental parts with actual lyrics which describe a man going through a cycle of life. He goes through innocence, darkness, paradise, blindness, and later wiseness. Most of the lyrics have to do with drummer Mike Portnoy and the loss of his mother. Although singer James LaBrie came onboard for the previous album, this song fits his smooth and operatic lyrics well, and further introduces him to the band. Also new to this CD is the addition of Derek Sherinian on keyboards. I honestly don’t think he did much on this album, and it wasn’t until the next full LP that he became more integrated into the band, but you can hear him here.

Okay, great 23-minute song and all, but this is actually a 57-minute EP, because the next four tracks come from a live set at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club. The band covers Elton John, Deep Purple, and Led Zeppelin in full-sized and fairly serious renditions, showing their influences but taking the guitars up a notch and making things sound much more prog-rock. They finish the album with a ten-minute medley of Pink Floyd, Kansas, Queen, Genesis, Journey, and the Dixie Dregs, all smashed together and played at full speed. It’s funny to hear LaBrie cheeze out a bit on “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’”, while the band prepares to launch into the next cover in a millisecond.

This was the first time, to me, a band had ever done such an odd little record, and I loved it. Since then, Dream Theater have recorded a shitload of cover tunes, even playing entire albums like Metallica’s Master of Puppets live, and then releasing it on CD. That dilutes things a bit, and it introduces the paradox where bands releasing more and more things to their fans are making it harder and harder to be a fan, because you have to buy truckloads of rare CDs. But in 1995, when this came out, it really hit the spot, giving me something to play over and over until their next album came out. The cover songs are not infinitely replayable, but I still do like the title track, and love that a band could come out with an EP like this, instead of just recording a bunch of reworked B-sides and scattering them across all of their Japanese CD-singles.

Rating: 8

This oddly-titled release is often bemoaned as being too “alternative” or “grunge” by many fair-weathered fans of the band, which is a pretty inaccurate comparison. This came at a time when many bands were cutting their long hair and trying to move out of the strictly-defined world of metal to survive, and bands from Metallica to Tori Amos were being called “grunge” or “like Soundgarden” by disgruntled purists. The funny thing is that this album was recorded in Nashville, and probably owes more to country, or at least the new alt-country sound of the era. And it’s also produced by Peter Collins, who desked Queensryche’s two most popular albums (Operation: Mindcrime and Empire) and is more of a direct connection to the band’s metal background than anything else.

One thing is true about this album: it was the last studio album to be recorded by the original lineup of the band; Chris DeGarmo split after this release. (Yes, I know he came back later, but that’s not really the same.) It’s pretty clear that there were differences within the band as this album came together, and its failure to be another Empire was probably just the gasoline dashed on the fire.

This isn’t a pseudo-concept album like Promised Land, and it isn’t aimed at that kind of niche listener, either. It starts out with the slightly metal single “Sign of the Times,” and the album proceeds to trade off writing credits between singer Geoff Tate and guitarist Chris DeGarmo. The DeGarmo tracks are much more laid back and almost border on the kind of stuff you could see on the Country Music TV channel. Tate trades off with more socially-aware tracks like “spOOL,” which features lyrics like “Focus on a strategy to / open up our minds and then, / together… turn another turn.” It sounds like something Jefferson Airplane, but it rocks out well.

It’s worth noting to those who are interested in this (usually inept metal purists stuck in the past) - Geoff Tate can’t sing anymore, or at least he can’t sing the crazy operatic stuff. He’s slowly lowered his ability to do this, a pack or two a day. To be fair, he can sing, and he does it well, but he’s not going to do any of those breaking-glass shrieking howls anymore. And for the most part, that stuff’s been written out. “spOOL” is a good example of how he really tries to reach his old limits, but he can barely make it.

I’d hate to hear that song live at the end of a tour. (In fact ,they didn’t play this song live on this tour, although Tate did play it later when he was touring for his solo album.) The good news is that on this album, he has really started to write his stuff in a slightly lower register, and his voice still has a great tone to it. But if you’re one of those “god damn it, he hit that high note 20 years ago, what the fuck” people, I don’t know what to tell you.

And I should give an obligatory mention to the one song that’s sung by Chris DeGarmo and not Tate. It’s “All I Want,” and it’s truly horrifying. It’s like the bad b-side to an Oasis single, and it’s in your best interest to program your CD player accordingly, or remove it from your iTunes playlist. The only thing interesting about this song is that I’m sure it came to be because of a major inter-band argument, and I could imagine DeGarmo pouting “I want to sing one song or I’m going to quit!” and then locking himself in a bathroom for four hours.

Going back to this album, it really reminds me of 1997 in a lot of ways. I mean, I did listen to it constantly back then, (except for that “All I Want” song) and it’s just such a pleasant little mix of metal and a slightly more contemporary blend of pop. It came at a time when the whole grunge thing was long dead, but when metal was also completely slain by this alt-rock beast (or not). I remember at that time really stretching to find something new to listen to, because I was getting bored of just re-buying old metal albums, and I wasn’t about to cash in to the electronica craze or the Smashing Pumpkins or whatever the hell was going on at that moment. And for me, this album just sounded RIGHT. It was smooth, it wasn’t just a metallic collection of screaming solos, it had substance, but it wasn’t a giant rock opera or some pretentious format that would make me only listen to it twice a year. It was intensely enjoyable, and had unlimited repeat playability.

And of course, it was the last album before the group fell apart, and that’s my typical luck. In other bad luck, EMI, the band’s label, went bankrupt during the tour for this album.  The band financed the rest of the tour themselves, but I’m sure the financial strain and lack of label support for the album didn’t help tensions in the band.  (It also guaranteed a worthless box set and “best-of” album to get out of contractual obligations once the label was bought out of bankruptcy later.)

But despite the fact that everyone thought this album was “Queensryche meets Soundgarden” or some insipid nonsense like that, I really do enjoy this record, and I still do, over a decade later.

Rating: 9

After the 1988 release of Operation: Mindcrime, Queensryche weren’t in a position to put on a lavish stage show or three-hour headlining concert yet; in fact, they spent their time opening for Metallica on the epic …And Justice For All tour. (Unfortunately, they were only on the first leg of this tour; by the time I got to see Metallica supporting this album in the summer of 1989, we had to endure The Cult as an opener.) But after the huge success of 1990’s Empire, the band had enough clout to book an extensive headlining tour, which included all of the video screens needed to produce a show that could feature the rock-opera album in its entirety.

In October 1991, EMI released this limited-edition box set containing a CD (or cassette - remember those?) and VHS video of the entire Mindcrime album, performed live, along with a booklet and a box, of the “long” sort (for those of you old enough to remember CDs sold in long boxes.) This limited edition release could both be seen as a nice tribute to the fans, or a “why did they do that?” misstep, depending on how you look at it.

As far as the CD goes, it’s the entire Mindcrime album, exactly. Exactly. No extras, no bonus, no covers, just the album, and that’s it. The performance is pretty good, and it’s upbeat and doesn’t drag, plus Geoff Tate’s vocals are pretty good and aren’t scratched or busted, as they were on the latter half of this monstrously long tour. There are some issues with levels in places; sometimes, a sample from the album is too quiet or muddled, or a guitar isn’t as up-front as it may be on the album. I’m sure part of that problem is that I listened to Mindcrime about 20,000 times before I heard this album, so I tend to notice all of the little bits here and there.

The video is also exactly what’s on the album. They did a good job of having lots of cameras and many angles and stuff moving, which is decent. They also captured a lot of the video projection screens, and showed clips of the story as it’s going on. It’s not as good as watching all of the actual videos back-to-back, which are compiled together in another release, but it’s much more than just watching the band play live.

The problem? The band just came off their biggest tour ever, with all of these new songs on Empire, and all of the classic stuff from the older albums, and this box set captures only those exact songs on Mindcrime. No “Silent Lucidity,” no “Queen of the Reich,” no other tracks are added to the CD, either from the same massive 3-hour set from which this live album was removed, or from their b-sides or other catalogue. (If you were lucky enough to find the Japanese release, it came with “The Lady Wore Black” and “Roads to Madness” as bonus tracks.) If I was a new fan of the band, this would be a pretty bad purchase to make, unless I bought it specifically to find out more about the prior album. It also means there’s no real reason to listen to this CD when one can just listen to the far superior studio version. In fact, I don’t think, prior to this review, I’ve even cracked the case on my copy for a good six or seven years.

There’s also a big disconnect here as far as formats. The old version was a VHS and a CD (or tape). I never, ever watch old VHS anymore, so this thing sits in the case gathering dust. But if I wanted to listen to the CD or rip it to my iPod, it’s there. This was the only version available, and despite the fact that this was a “limited edition,” you could occasionally find a new copy in the back of a music store, five years later. (I think I got mine at a Wherehouse in 1997.) But they were hard to find, and in that pre-eBay world, it meant you either had to buy a boot, pay someone a hundred bucks for a used copy, or try every record store in a thousand-mile radius.

In 2001, when their record label was performing necrophilia on their back-catalogue, Capitol re-released this box set as a regular DVD. This means you don’t have a CD, which might not work in your car or when ripping the audio to your MP3 player. (Actually, they released the CD as a standalone also - but if you buy that, you don’t get the video.) But you have everything on a DVD, and they also added some bonus features, like an interview, some graphics and fan photos, and a few crumbs of nebulous information that might help you figure out the story, if you’re still struggling with who really killed Mary. I don’t know what the packaging or liner notes are like on this version, but if they are anything like the other reissues and box sets Capitol put out for the band’s other material, I’m guessing “shitty.”

But, I have the BOX SET which makes me more elite than you wankers who first got into the band in like 1999. Don’t worry, you’re not missing much. It’s a good collection, and a good intention, but I wish they would have released a 3-CD live album of the 1991 tour instead.

Rating: 7

Everyone remembers Joe Satriani’s third studio album as “the one where he started singing”, and it’s true. The guitar genius, for whatever reason, decided to add his vocals to some of the tracks of his otherwise instrumental discography, and it stuck out like a sore thumb at the time.  It’s also true that he released many more later albums without singing, and the people who stopped listening to his musical output in 1989  solely because “he sings now” are largely stupid, much like the people who claim Seattle grunge bands singlehandedly killed glam metal bands, even though most glam metal bands were a fad, and conversely, MTV was still kissing Guns N’ Roses’ collective asses and the Metallica black album was selling about 50,000 copies a day well after Kurt Cobain’s headless body had gone room temp. Satriani tried something, it didn’t work, he went on with other things. Right?

Anyway, this 18-track album covers a pretty wide area of sonic terrain. It’s a lot less straightforward than his previous two albums, but the guitar sound matured and progressed much more. I’m not saying he didn’t have a handle on his general tone before this, but his Ibanez-based notemaking is much more refined and deep on this album. Mix that with a bunch of new writing, and you have about an hour of pretty diverse listening ahead of you.

First, we start out with the title track. It starts off with a weird radio voice and the strumming of an acoustic guitar. The voice actually came from a time Joe fired up his practice amp in the studio and some weird radio interference crossed over with a radio or a cordless phone or something, and he immediately grabbed a mic and recorded it for the song. The guitar goes into a gentle, controlled feedback line with some very laid-back drum and bass behind it, to produce an extremely smooth melody. It builds up, as Satriani lays into it a bit more and does some shredding, mixed with more sustained notes and feedback. He’s often used this song as an opener live, and it still sounds as incredible as it did back when I first got this disc.

There are almost “groupings” of songs interleaved through this album. They would be loosely categorized as “songs like Surfing With the Alien”, “ballady laid-back stuff”, “bluesy stuff”, and “total experiments”. And that is roughly the order, from best to worst, I’d use to categorize them. So maybe I should just talk about each of them and why they did or didn’t work.

“Stuff like Surfing…” would include “The Mystical Potato Head Groove Thing”, which is a slightly quirky but incredibly fun instrumental piece. “One Big Rush” is better known from the movie Say Anything, which basically means three billion people have heard Joe Satriani, but have no idea who he is. The more ballady stuff includes “I Believe”, in which he sings, and it’s incredibly sappy, but it probably found its’ way onto many mix tapes for girlfriends back when people made mix tapes (as opposed to just stealing music and burning CDs). As far as bluesy stuff, there’s “Big Bad Moon”, another singing track, but it’s not bad.

And the experiments. Some work, like a distorted harmonica bit in “Headless”, or the funky “Strange”. There’s a banjo piece in “The Feeling” that’s actually pretty interesting. (Of course, I also like Adrian Legg.) “The Phone Call” is probably one of the worst tracks he’s done. It’s a sort of four-bar blues thing, with all of the lyrics sung over a phone. George Thorogood is going to be forced to write songs like this in hell. “Ride” takes a close second in the worst song department. It’s a repeating ZZ Top-ripoff song with a really inept chorus that makes me wonder if this album should have been trimmed down to a solid 45 minutes, with an armload of really bad b-sides waiting in the wings.

I feel like I’ve only mentioned about half of the songs on this album. I really do like “Day at the Beach,” which is an entirely guitar thing, just him playing an intricate tune with two hands, and then halfway through, he goes back and repeats the whole melody at double speed. There are two two-part songs, “The Forgotten,” and “The Bells of Lal,” which both start with solos and then have a song as the second part, and they work well.

Like I said, overall this is a really uneven album. It’s the kind of thing I can’t listen to from start to finish without skipping tracks, but then I also find a great need to repeat some tracks over and over. This album seems to be a weird transition for Joe, because before this, he was really reigned in to record a typical “rock album” that was 40 minutes long, with 4 songs per side, and 2 tracks that are breakout singles. It seems like this time he was given total control, and he went over the line a little too much. He’s released many other great albums (some with no singing, too, if you’re still stuck on that), so we have this learning experience to show for it. But, it’s a great album, and I still find myself going back to it a lot. And the opening title track alone is worth the price of admission, so I’ll always love this.

Rating: 8