Running time: 35:25
Production: Rush & Terry Brown
Release date: 1980
Label: Atlantic Records
“Permanent Waves”, or the Rush album of transition, slowly walks away from the band’s fantasy-world stage and prog-rock jargon, swapping them for a firm grounding in an ever-deeper dive into the essence of art rock and a grasp of 1980s “mainstream” rock. It’s a great in-between record, and one of its tracks sticks out a mile into the eighties, pointing to where the band was headed next: shorter, tighter, more accessible songs. With two excellent predecessors in “Hemispheres” and “A Farewell To Kings”, Rush had won over the critical mass across the board. That had a soothing effect on the band’s remarkable looseness in the studio and their clear focus on tackling new musical challenges, which would radically reshape and renew the future face of Rush’s music.
It was only logical that Geddy Lee couldn’t keep screeching forever, and that sooner or later every last vocal cord and neck muscle would snap from it. So the first of the radical changes is that Lee mostly turns to singing in a “normal” voice, though there are still stretches where he lets it “bulge” (the third verse in the pre-chorus of Freewill, for example).
For the first time, Rush are clearly building on minimizing the ideas used in their songs. The perfect example of the new Rush for the new decade is the opener, The Spirit Of Radio. The lyrics themselves spring from the band’s personal sense of the magic that the freedom of creating and expressing yourself through music offers. Real magic, though. Rock music, of course. It’s all spelled out in the verses, even that it’s only a question of “sincerity”, but in the end it’s all just an illusion, since the boundless beauty of music made is cheapened by the inevitable jingle-jangle of the money-grubbers. The song has a lively cynicism and positive notes, and Rush stamp it with their familiar explorative wit toward the end, when they jump into a compatible reggae trick. This track is graced by one of the band’s greatest qualities: they managed to combine complex structure (especially the tricky rhythmic turns) with perfect listenability! Freewill then keeps the album’s radio-friendly bent going. It’s an even more fluid song, with an even more prominent melodic component of remarkable compactness that gets under your skin in a flash. To this day it’s one of Rush’s main favorites in their ironclad live repertoire, where Lifeson’s guitar really catches fire (plus some damn fast soloing).
For everyone who got the hiccups after cleverly figuring out that “Permanent Waves” is simply not “Hemispheres”, nor “Farewell To Kings”, Jacob’s Ladder brings back a bit of hope. The lyrics refer to rays of light breaking through a veil of clouds and forming an apparent ladder toward the sun, though you might also think of the biblical patriarch Jacob, climbing his ladder and getting up close and personal with angels (even if that last bit isn’t the song’s message). Despite the polishing and fine-tuning of the sound in the studio, Jacob’s Ladder is a typical prog piece, marked above all by a longer instrumental middle section with an added touch of mysticism, stirred up mostly by the keyboards in the background. It’s the first moment on the record that shows the darker side of how Rush’s music can be perceived, and the cherry on top is Lifeson’s sharp guitar arrangements, which bind vividly, dynamically and seamlessly to the rhythmic platform and the curtain of background keyboards. Lifeson’s guitar literally drives the whole song forward, stringing together a colorful run of motivic turns amid the superb accompaniment and conversation of the rhythm section around it. The heavily mystical mood and the ethereal moment of calm sailing on synthesizers at the start of the song’s last third are a real balm for fans of the band’s prog era.
The songs that “simplify” the album from here on are Entre Nous and Different Strings. Acoustic and electric are combined beautifully, and Different Strings has classical piano neatly woven in. Both tracks come across as ballads, capturing a hint of the essence of earlier, not-so-distant attempts of this kind, like Madrigal or The Trees, but the more controlled electric guitar sound in the production already shows where Rush are heading next.
The album’s peak is saved for the end. Natural Sience is the record’s second prog-rock epic. It’s a suite that repeats the vanishing magic of the seventies, already caught in Jacob’s Ladder. This trilogy uses some of the motifs Peart had created for a longer poem about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Sir Gawain And The Green Knight), a story from the 14th century, the age of the King Arthur legend, an idea he later dropped. The central theme of the lyrics is one that’s always relevant today: the negation of nature, driven by humanity’s innate need to subdue it, and the resulting loss of our roots with nature. The song is built from three parts and comes close to hitting the 10-minute mark. The “honest man”, in the sense of sorting the heap of human characters, belongs to the most endangered species on Earth. That’s how it was in 1980, and that’s how it is today. Whatever happens, the world will go on. One way or another. With humans or without (part three: Permanent Waves). Apocalyptic, but real. A world of imagination or of logic? The eternal question of how this duality coexists, and we can’t exist without it. And we upset the balance whenever we tip in favor of one or the other. The song is a sprawling prog Rush foldout, in which the band once again managed to optimally combine every factor of their uniqueness. Plenty of vivid transitions, complex time signatures, a dash of spontaneity in the unpredictable run of motivic turns, with a brilliant touch of high dynamics and listenability.
“Permanent Waves” came out on 01/14/1980. It’s one of the first albums released in the new decade, and it neatly signals where “mainstream” rock itself was going to develop. It’s a vivid example of a transitional album, painting a picture of a band with one foot carefully stepping over the threshold of new musical boundaries, and flirting fearlessly with new challenges in sound and style.
9/10
Tracklist:
- Spirit of the Radio (4:56)
- Freewill (5:21)
- Jacob’s Ladder (7:26)
- Entre Nous (4:37)
- Different Strings (3:48)
- Natural Science (9:17)
Musicians:
Geddy Lee – vocals, bass guitar, bass pedals, synthesizer
Alex Lifeson – guitar, bass pedals
Neil Peart – drums, percussion
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Hugh Syme – classical piano on Different Strings
Erwig Chuapchuaduah – metal drums
