Rushing Headlong Into the Present

The seminal Canadian rock trio Rush perhaps epitomize the changing nature of the music business as much as any overwhelming successful, vintage act.
     Two years ago, the unclassifiable "progressive hard rock" band began work on a "steampunk" concept album that was already titled Clockwork Angels.  Drummer/lyricist Neil Peart, an avid reader who has incorporated innumerable literary themes, allusions, and tropes into his lyrics over the years, had come up with an idea inspired by anti-dystopian science fiction writers from Jules Verne to Peart's friend (and "steampunk" pioneer) Kevin J. Anderson.  As Peart describes the band's outlook at the time in his essay for their 2010 Time Machine Tour (do follow the link and read the entire piece, which couldn't be more relevant to this post or this blog): "Now the typical thing to do would be to start writing songs toward making an album, then launch a tour behind that in 2011 or so. However, these days an 'album' is an abstraction dearer to artists than to audiences, and it didn't seem necessary to follow that timeworn pattern anymore. 'Crisis is both danger and opportunity,' goes the old Chinese saying, and we were kind of excited about doing things a different way."  The band decided to finish and record two songs of their emerging, futuristic story ("Caravan" and "BU2B," the latter's title--"text-speak" for "Brought Up to Believe"--an ironic nod to a disconcerting trend and its technology), release them digitally (though there was a belated, perfunctory CD maxi-single release), then spend the summer of 2010 on the road instead of in the studio.
     The show they took on the road was a masterful blend of the band's past, present, and future: it included both new songs as well as recent songs, long-unplayed oldies, and never-before-performed songs (recent and otherwise).  (Click on the link for my review.)  Consonant with current trends (and perhaps understandable, given their age), they spread the tour out with two fairly brief legs over a period of two successive summers, satiating the arena rock nostalgia of their aging audience but necessarily pushing back work on Clockwork Angels.
     Clockwork Angels is now finished.  It is scheduled for release on June 12, to be followed by a tour tentatively slated to being in September.  And a third song, "Headlong Flight," dropped digitally today, incredibly streaming on the website of the band's longtime critical nemesis, Rolling Stone (here is irony: as I write this, a link to rollingstone.com and its streaming track adorn's the front page of the band's official website alongside those modern, digital advertisements for pre-orders of the album in singular and "bundle" form).
     Given the band's (or, at least, Peart's) initial jaundiced eye on cyberspace (1996's "Virtuality" is an astringent excoriation of the then-inchoate Internet and its culture of seeming isolation and seclusion), the band's complete divorce from their and their industry's past may seem like more irony.  However, this observer and long-time fan expected these three visionaries, traditionally advocates of technology in song and elsewhere, to remember that "the misuse of something is no argument against its use."  This is a band that has typically embraced change wholeheartedly without a backward glance (don't be surprised if Clockwork Angels is not issued in the audiophile vinyl format, which is one ostensibly nostalgic trend I wish the band would follow along with their quasi-nostalgic, annual summer tours).
     "Headlong Flight" is very much cut from the same cloth as "Caravan" and "BU2B."  Musically, it is an amalgam of many songs from the protean band's crunchier eras (1970's: viz., "By-Tor and the Snow Dog" and "Bastille Day," and 1990's: viz., "Driven").  The six minute track is upbeat, dense, and "progressive" (consistent with Peart's comments that their more recent, less sprawling, streamlined music is "compressed complexity") (six minutes being comparatively short when contrasted with much of their work through the early 1980's).  The sinuous bass guitar introduction of Geddy Lee (also the band's vocalist and keyboardist) and the riffing of Alex Lifeson--alternately intense and textured, bludgeoning block-chords and sustained open ones--should be familiarly comforting to long-time fans while still indicative of new directions.  Lee's voice is now largely shed of the piercing falsetto that repelled many critics for years.  You should go listen to it now.
     Perhaps I'll see you on the Clockwork Angels Tour.