Artist: Rush
Label: Mercury Records
Released: 1982
Rating: 5/5
This album is the logical follow-up to “Moving Pictures” and a logical step up from its sound. The Rush sound gets a new look, floating on the blissful sound of (by today’s standards primitive) Oberheim synthesizers. On a superficial listen back when it came out, this move turned off plenty of die-hard Rush fans, the ones who demanded another “Moving Pictures”, “A Farewell To Kings” or “Permanent Waves” and swore by the sound the band had built through the seventies. They simply couldn’t hear guitars on it anymore, and that was enough for them to brand it the ugly duckling.
The eighties simply brought a new era, and Rush didn’t want to sit it out. They absolutely had to, and wanted to, cash in on all their talents and push the sound forward evolutionarily. The basic change on “Signals” comes from Geddy Lee, who dressed practically every song in synthesizer sound. That typical eighties synthesizer sound.
In the production you can still clearly make out that thick, voluminous bass line that keeps everything organically alive, while Geddy’s genius once again serves up outrageous melodicity, sparkling especially in the transitional parts, where it winds around the potential plasticity of a guitar riff (Chemistry) that sails along against a curtain of synthesizers pushed to the front of the mix.
It’s exactly this sharply defined synthesizer sound that gives “Signals” an extraordinarily atmospheric upgrade over all previous Rush albums. One of the most beautiful songs not just on this album but in the entire Rush discography, called Subdivisdions, which also opens the record, is one of the most direct proofs of this solid atmosphere, which can feel downright transcendental or esoteric to the more receptive (more sensitive) listener. In the rich curtain of sinthesyzers the guitar riffs are audible, sure, but they’re deliberately kept in the background, and that precedence extends even to the guitar solos, which you can barely feel. They’re added “like seasoning”, mostly in the outros of the songs (The Analog Kid, Chemistry). Geddy’s thin, clean, melodic vocal, which long ago forgot the frenetic screaming of the seventies Rush albums, is for the first time ideally capitalized on, accompanied by the synthesyzer drapery, and as such it effectively builds on the captured moment of esotericism.
“Signals” is an incredibly dynamic album. Its songs are clearly separate entities, with completely newly configured atmospheres as well as a different approach to composing. Right after Subdivisons comes an extraordinary leap in atmosphere with The Analog Kid, where the synthesizers only show up in the chorus, which directly conjures the atmosphere of Subdivisions, and that motif of longing for unspoiled, unfaked authenticity could easily have been worked into Subdivisions too. Then comes a sudden switch into an organic pre-chorus leaning hard on Geddy’s bass rattling. This duality of moods is one of the most appealing trademarks of the album throughout.
Chemistry, lyrically the backbone of “Signals”, widens the artistic range as Rush cling even more feverishly to the new options that keyboards offer. It’s the first time you can sense a reggae trick (in the transition before the chorus). That reggae touch, which is more strongly emphasized elsewhere on the album, e.g. on Digital Man, became the first stumbling block during the making of the record. Rush clashed in the studio with producer Terry Brown over the reggae motifs. He was in no way sympathetic to the band’s wish to explore their own sonic reach, and as a result he got booted from the studio.
This boundless exploration is illustrated by another outstanding and uniquely original song, The Weapon, where synthesizers add an extra undercurrent of rhythm to Peart’s drumming, which in the end even works for spinning in “eighties” discos. New World Man confirms the band’s exceptional finesse and sophistication, graced by an atmospheric alternation between a sophisticatedly guided main motif and one guided in a typical rock hairdo. Short and sweet, less demanding, and with real potential for radio airplay.
Speaking of that moment of esotericism, besides Subdivisions it also stands out strongly in the seventh song, Losing It. Here the guys added a violin to the sound. The song is a melancholic murmur of the deepest feelings of artists.
The beginning and the end of the album are its most intense moments. Countdown is a song that ideally captures Rush’s music in every respect, even for the biggest layperson who had never heard the name Rush before. It combines the trio’s intellect in ideal doses. Those doses coexist within the album’s most demanding composition, co-creating constantly shifting moods of stacked atmospheres and leading motivic contradictions, woven ideally together, which is the most attractive aspect of exploring Rush’s music. In Countdown, precisely because of its most progressive stance, Rush bring back some of the missed guitar “chopping”, which revives the spirit of the earlier records, the one that Rush had finally and forever buried with “Signals”.
Neil Peart once again proved the sparkle of his mind and laid out some extremely deep personal confessions in the lyrics, which Geddy and Alex once again brought to life phenomenally in their search for the most fitting melodies. Subdivisions, for example, tells how unwelcome nonconformists are in society (the line “Conform, or be cast out!”). It’s a sophisticated placement of a purely rebellious attitude, which once again exposes the artificially injected virus of punk roughness as a complete lie. The Analog Kid’s lyrics strive for the feeling of primal nature, its authenticity and genuineness, Chemistry presents different ways humanity communicates by sending signals (Rush even touch on the field of human physiology, e.g. the line “Electricity? Biology?”), and the album cover, with a Dalmatian sniffing a fire hydrant sprayed with canine signal secretions, fits this song most aptly. The Weapon is a response to the Cold War, New World Man to the growing vulnerability of humanity, which wrongly looks to science for control and safety, Losing It to the transience of human life, in which dreams stay unfulfilled…. In short: the language of rebellion, delivered in the most splendidly sophisticated way. Facts that were relevant more than 25 years ago, and themes Rush would turn to again many times in the future.
It’s precisely these richly colorful sonic collages and sonic contrasts, clearly built on a thick melodic bass, Geddy’s distinctive vocal and a rich curtain of synthesizers, that keep delighting in various combinations across “Signals”. In fact, these three basic building blocks are what make this album so special, so unique, and consequently an album a listener can explore for a very, very long time. It’s an album of unique sound and style, with a masterful dash of unpredictability and spontaneity from the eternally refined and polished genius of Rush’s artistry, at times “deliberately” picking the strangest motivic opposites, which is exactly why they attract each other so endlessly and are one of the main trademarks of Rush’s music (Losing It).
In Rush’s forever progressive discography, always geared toward constant development, the album “Signals” represented one of the most clearly defined milestones of the band’s career. What this album meant, and still means today, not just for the band’s own further development but also as a model for other bands, we’ll never be able to fully cover in these few sentences. It’s an album that captured eternal relevance, eternal evergreen status. Only the greatest bands were capable of such albums, the ones who clearly co-shaped and defined rock n’ roll in an era when there was still enough room to steer well clear of recycling ideas.
“Signals” is the last Rush album of which we can say without a doubt that, despite the band’s new sonic direction, it still carries a completely organic (natural), living sound, one that gives you the feeling while listening that the trio is playing live while recording in the studio. The further washing out of the sound through the eighties on later Rush albums rinsed away forever that last symbolic moment of nostalgia for “when rock was still young”.
Lineup
Geddy Lee – vocals, bass guitar, bass pedals, synthesizers
Alex Lifeson – guitar, bass pedals
Neil Peart – drums, percussion
GUEST MUSICIAN:
Ben Mink – violin on track no. 7
Production
Rush & Terry Brown
Track list
1. Subdivisions (5:32)
2. The Analog Kid (4:46)
3. Chemistry (4:56)
4. Digital Man (6:20)
5. The Weapon(6:22)
6. New World Man (3:41)
7. Losing It (4:51)
8. Countdown (5:49)
Running time: 42.17
