Retaining Peter Collins as their producer, the band went about recording their 12th studio album, and
Hold Your Fire was the result. While still featuring a lot of keyboards, they were pulled back a tad, and while
Power Windows sounded very big and grandiose,
Hold Your Fire was more intimate and even, as Geddy once said, romantic in some ways. Overall, it has a very melodic feel, even if some of the many crescendos sound very crash-bangy, for lack of a better term. Granted, this is probably an album that Alex looks back on and cringes at his guitar tone, which he has described as being "wiry," but it works for the style this album was written in. Often times, it is like he is dancing around a melodic keyboard line, like during the chorus of "Open Secrets," and distortion and/or a heavier tone wouldn't have fitted there at all. So, while different, it stands out for him in the sense of you won't find another Rush album where his playing is like it is on this record. I think he has probably proud of that some to some extent, and he should be. As always, Geddy and Neil were on the top of their game, on their respective instruments, as well.
As for the songs, it is loaded with good ones. "Mission" is arguably a top 10 Rush song by just about any standard; that ending - "It's cold comfort..." - is just magnificent. I've always been partial to "Turn the Page" and "Prime Mover," and "Lock and Key" and "Open Secrets" are easily two of their most underrated songs ever. Longtime live favorites "Force Ten" and "Time Stand Still" are both great, and I've always like "High Water" way more than most others seem to. "Second Nature" and "Tai Shan" kind of stand out as being the least best of the bunch, but are both enjoyable enough to not skip over when listening from start to finish, even if the band recently referred to "Tai Shan" as being one of their biggest mistakes ever.
Overall, this is often a hard album to rank accordingly, cause it is so different. I can't say it's as good as any of the Big 5, or
Power Windows, or a couple of their post-1980s albums, so when doing the math, it comes off as an "average" Rush record, but there really is no shame in that considering how great so many of their albums are. This is totally a "snapshot in time" album; it sounds like 1987 in many regards. Had this album been recorded in 1981 or 1992, God only knows how different it would have been, but I am happy it came out the way it did, and I still listen to this one a lot. Really good record.
Topic: The History of Rush v. Discography Thread: Epilogue (Read 85579 times)
