Though I don’t doubt his musical genius – the new Porcupine Tree album is excellent – my experience in developing my musical taste contrasted with Steven Wilson’s experience. Rather than my taste developing in contrast with my parents, I instead inherited my preferences from them, especially from my father. One band we both love is Rush. Indeed, it was my father who constantly referred to Moving Pictures as being one of rock’s quintessential albums, a sentiment I quickly found vindicated.
For my father, Moving Pictures also serves as the Rubicon of Rush’s discography, at least in the 80s, emphatically warning me that after Moving Pictures, the band spent the next decade in a passionate love affair with any worthwhile metalhead’s greatest foe; the analog synthesizer. He clarified that the musicianship was still top-notch within Rush’s so-called “synth era” and that they were not selling out. Rather, he views this era as an earnest but failed period of sonic experimentation.
I bring up this anecdote because it speaks to how many Rush fans felt. This is an attitude reflected in hard rock musicians like Tim Commerford in the excellent documentary Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, who, like my dad, view the period with a kind of icy apprehension. Wikipedia likewise refers to 1982 to 1989 as being Rush’s “synthesizer-oriented era,” an era that began with 1982’s Signals, though they don’t pass judgement on the quality of the music. The notion of a single, unitary synth-era within Rush’s music is one I’ll save unpacking for another time, however.
By 1978’s Hemispheres, Rush was just as heavy metal as anything Judas Priest or Rainbow was doing at the same time, not to mention that it was monstrously more complex than almost anything released at the same time. Hemispheres was a watershed however, as the band unanimously agreed they had exhausted that particular niche and that something had to change. By 1980’s Permanent Waves and then on Moving Pictures, hints of reggae and synthpop crept in, and the music got more melodic. While the changes on these two albums weren’t dramatic, they were there, and Moving Pictures closing track “Vital Signs” is every bit as new wave as The Police or Talking Heads. Rush was clearly heading in a certain musical direction from 1980 onwards, and Signals was just merely the continuation of their decisive embrace of new wave music that occurred on “Vital Signs.”
Those first notes of “Subdivisions” sets the tone for Signals perfectly. Played on Geddy Lee’s Oberheim OB-X synthesizer, the keyboard ostinato that christens the song is both warm and ominous. Though Signals is very obviously a product of the 80s, at no point does its production sound dated or cheesy. The keyboard tones throughout “Subdivisions” and Signals are ethereal and futuristic-sounding, rather than obnoxious like the keyboards in so much 80a (let alone modern) synthpop was.
Indeed, when Alex Lifeson on guitar and Neil Peart on drums come in shortly after, there’s an evident anxiety even without any vocals to confirm this. With the tone perfectly set, the lyrics of “Subdivisions” deal with the teenage alienation from life in the suburbs. With brilliant words like “No where is the dreamer/or the misfit so alone” Neil Peart beautifully captures the loneliness of growing up in suburbia; there’s a beautiful world out in the city, but much of the city is inaccessible to kids, and what time they do get downtown is fleeting. All of Rush, including Peart, grew up in suburban Toronto in the mid 20th century. Being an offspring of Canadian suburbia, Peart’s words ring just as true 40 years later.
Beyond the apprehensive tone the intro sets, “Subdivisions” is also unique because it's the first song in the Rush discography where the keyboards are the melodic centre. Being a power trio, Geddy Lee has had more room on bass than most bassists, but even with Lee’s loud bass playing, Alex Lifeson on the guitar has generally had the lead role in driving Rush’s melodies. Likewise, there have been keyboards in some capacity on every Rush album since 2112, but they were far more textural and not nearly so prominent as they are on “Subdivisions.” Consequently, after surrendering the melodic lead to Lee, Lifeson’s guitar joins Peart in the rhythm section, showing his chops as not only one of rock’s finest lead guitarists, but also as a rhythm guitarist.
This dynamic is upended during the choruses and the guitar solo, which is one of Lifeson’s most tasteful, where Geddy switches off the keyboards in favour of the bass. And Peart, ever a maestro of the drum kit, gives a nerve-wracking performance; notice how intense the drumming gets from 3:12 to 3:30 at the end of the second verse. The increased tempo at which Peart drums during this brief section invokes the imagery of a ticking clock, as if to say time is running out. This compacts the urgency that many teenagers feel; as if they don’t have their whole life ahead of them. This is a relatively subtle change in rhythm that many first time listeners likely won’t pick up on, but every single part of “Subdivisions” was meticulously crafted, least among them the drumming.
As hopefully illustrated by spending 400 words on the song alone, it cannot be understated – “Subdivisions” is a masterpiece within an album. It is one of the best and most touching songs ever written and released. Every note played accentuates the alienation of suburbia, something which Rush was wonderfully in touch with despite now being massive stars on the tail of Moving Pictures. “Subdivisions” also musically and thematically sets the tone for Signals.
Musically, it shows that Rush has finally embraced the new wave influences they teased at on Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures, but they do so without compromising on their traditional style of heavy progressive rock. This is still a guitar-based rock band that was yet to abandon their instruments typical of the 70s – Geddy Lee’s bass-of choice was still the Rickenbacker 4001, Alex Lifeson was still playing his Gibson guitars and there were no electronic drums in sight. But even if the vestiges of the 70s are still there, Rush was not treading new ground even if they didn’t sound completely foreign. Their move to new wave was not so sudden or so drastic that they sounded like a different band, unlike their progressive priors in Genesis and Yes. Even the album’s detractors admit that Rush’s new wave experiment was one bourne of a good faith interest in the music of the time, rather than them selling out.
Thematically, “Subdivisions” introduces two overriding feelings. The first is a kind of wonderment with the world, with the rapidity of technological advancement and the capacity of man to perform incredible feats. Just look at “Countdown” which celebrates the invention of the working space shuttle, or “Chemistry,” which celebrates the notion of science itself (along with analogizing the manner in which we interact with each other to chemistry.) This technological fixation is amplified by the omnipresence of synthesizers on the album.
Correspondingly, there’s an acuteness of the world around them hitherto unseen in Rush’s music on Signals. Like “Subdivisions,” “The Analog Kid” deals with the overwhelming anxiety of growing up and leaving home, reflected in one of Alex Lifeson’s most chaotic solos. “Digital Man,” “The Weapon” and “New World Man” are the intersection of Rush’s futuristic sound with their new found social consciousness. Despite its chipper-sounding, reggae-inspired bass fills and playful drumming, “Digital Man” paints a disturbingly Orwellian image of modern, urban working conditions, as if the Analog Kid grew up into a boringly dystopian office job.
“The Weapon,” the middle part of the Fear quadrilogy, is similar to many other Rush songs in its uncompromising individualism, but instead of dealing with individualism through fantastical science fiction, Peart’s lyrics here ostensibly deal with the usage of fear to rule people with, with – dare I say? – a particular focus on religion’s role in keeping people down. It helps too that the middle section, with a repetitive synth motif and a delirious-sounding guitar solo along with some danceable drumming, is full of oppressive anxiety.
“New World Man” is perhaps the most overtly political song Rush had recorded up to that point. It’s an outcropping of Cold War fears, something explored in greater detail on the album’s sequel Grace Under Pressure, providing a sarcastic assessment of Reagan’s America and its precarious position on the world stage. Though it was a concise, accessible pop hit – Rush’s only Canadian #1 single! – it lasts less than four minutes; that “New World Man” doesn’t elevate itself is perhaps the only major slight against this album.
And if the album’s greatest lyrical strength is how in-touch it is with earthly affairs, it brilliantly flips that dynamic on its head with “Losing It,” a song which describes a-once virtuoso’s abilities falling away. To my ears, it sounds like a heartbreaking description of a dementia patient who realizes they’re losing their mind. The electric violin on this song by guest instrumentalist Ben Mink is very cool too. It’s also notable in being, at least to my ears, the first Rush song with no bass on it whatsoever, with Geddy limiting himself to the synths and vocals.
Signals is an album all about change. The world was changing, music was changing, and Rush was changing. Technology was rapidly improving and was changing the way we live and interact with one another, but the fear of nuclear war was its heaviest since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Likewise, the explosion of new wave music and the sale of new, futuristic synthesizers, drum machines, and other new technologies had up-ended the musical establishment of the 70s. Rush, who had reached their creative and commercial apex with Moving Pictures boldly decided to build off Moving Pictures, rather than simply make another Moving Picture. Signals is not quite perfect like Moving Pictures is (then again, what is?) but it is still a great success. It simultaneously embraces the 80s in attitude and in sound while still staying true to what Rush is about, and 40 years later, it still sounds fresh and remains pertinent to the ever-changing and volatile world we anxiously live in today.