I just don't care about "the mix."
I can't understand this. The mix is one of the most significant facts in how an album sounds. It's how the instruments are balanced. A good mix can't really make bad songs good, but a bad mix sure can ruin songs that might otherwise be good. Compare the mixes on Moving Pictures and GUP, and the importance of the mix becomes obvious.
And likewise - I don't understand those for whom it matters enough to ruin an album for them. There might be an occasion where I wish the drums were a little louder or the vocals, etc, and I guess that's me talking about the mix without calling it that, but in the end, it doesn't change my feeling on the album.
The mix is just one of many reasons why GUP is not good (I hesitate to say "bad," but it's certainly not good). If, for example, MP were mixed like GUP and we were comparing it to Hemispheres, then that might tip the scale toward Hemispheres, but I'd still love MP. With GUP, there are many other reasons why I don't like it much.
GUP was my first “new” Rush album. (I first heard Rush at a 6th grade graduation party just a few months before Signals was released...but it was just one song. I wouldn’t hit full on Rush fanboi until mid-1983)
I'm a few years older than you, but I got into Rush around the same time (9th/10th grade for me). I was first exposed to Subdivisions and Countdown, which were played on fairly regular rotation on MTV, and I had gotten pretty well into the back catalog by the time GUP was released. Needless to say (given what I've already written here), it was a HUGE disappointment in pretty much every way, starting with that doofy picture on the inner sleeve (or was it the back cover?).
My beef with p/g is in the songwriting, the arrangement and the sound of the instruments. I LOVE melody. I like epic melodies like on Subdivisions, New World Man, Analog Kid, Marathon, and Manhattan Project. I think "Kid Gloves" is a disjointed mess. I think Red Lenses sounds forced> And while Neal Peart is on my Mt. Rushmore of drummers, that fill on Red Sector A right before "I hear the sound of gunfire at the prison gates..." sounds SO FRIGGIN' LAME for a drummer of Neal's caliber...
Yes, yes and yes (also, "the sound of the instruments" is part of the mix, so....).