Released: 1975
Tracks: Anthem; Best I Can; Beneath, Between and Behind; By-Tor and the Snow Dog; Fly By Night; Making Memories; Rivendell; In The End
Best track: Fly By Night
Tracks to skip: Best I Can, By-Tor and the Snow Dog
From this point forward, with a few exceptions, Rush puts out consistently good music. This album is such a huge leap in the right direction from the muck of the first album. It’s easy to assign the improvement to the addition of drummer and lyricist Neil Peart, but I think it’s something more that: I think most (maybe all) of these songs were written after Peart was in the band and with his drumming skills in mind. So this album isn’t merely a collection of the rest of Rush’s live set at the time, these are New Songs.
Obviously, the lyrics make a huge improvement on this one. Unfortunately, Geddy Lee still writes one of the lyrics, Best I Can, and it’s really not that great of a song. I’m not totally sold on By-Tor; you can see that they’re trying to do something ‘progressive’, but it just comes out as really lame. Especially the ‘fight sequence’ between the bass and guitar. So silly! As for the good ones, Fly By Night is such an awesome song, I still love it. Beneath…seems to get forgotten about by a lot of people, but it’s one of the better ones on here.
Besides those 2 missteps, the album’s pretty solid and holds up really well 27 years after its release. Already they’re getting away from being another Zeppelin rip-off band and are starting to sound like Rush. I can’t stress enough how much better this is than the first Rush album.
Rating: 88
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