Released: 1996
Tracks: Don’t Care; Promise; Start Today; Mr. X; At the End; Sending Out a Warning; Shut Up Shuttin’ Up; Strip and Go Naked; The Big Dance; Victor; I Am the Spirit
Best track: either Promise, Start Today or I Am the Spirit (Mr. X is cool too)
Tracks to skip: Don’t Care, Shut Up Shuttin’ Up, The Big Dance, Victor
After all the times I’ve listened to this I still think Don’t Care sucks ass. OK, I dig all the odd time signatures in it, but lyrically it is horrible. A very strange track to open the album. Victor was the ‘solo album’ from Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson. Lifeson wrote all the words to this (except for the title track, a poem by W. H. Auden) and while they’re not mind blowing, overall it’s nice to see him write a full album’s worth of lyrics, esp. since the last time he had a lyric credit in Rush was on 1982’s Signals. The core of the band is Lifeson doing guitar and bass (take that Geddy!), Blake Manning on drums and Edwin (singer for I Mother Earth) on vocals. A few different personnel changes here and there (Alex’s son Adrian and wife Charlene), but mostly the core band stays intact along with guitarist Bill Bell complimenting Lifeson.
I wasn’t very impressed with Geddy Lee’s solo album (My Favorite Headache), but most of this one is pretty good. I mean, some of these sound like Rush rejects, but they’re not really that bad. Hell, songwriting wise, these songs blow nearly all of Vapor Trails out of the water. The songs I really dig are Promise and Start Today. The bridge/chorus of Start Today is damn cool and Alex plays a nice guitar solo. I like how a lot of these songs show a different side of Alex Lifeson than we never really saw before. There’s some admittedly different stuff on here, but it adds to the whole.
Besides Don’t Care, Shut Up Shuttin’ Up is a dumb song. I know it’s supposed to be humorous, but it’s really unnecessary. Les Claypool’s talent is pretty much wasted in The Big Dance. Not only is it a stupid song, the music is really boring and the lyrics are almost as bad as the ones on Don’t Care. And yeah, all the different stuff does add to the mix, but the title track is cheesy and kinda useless. I don’t like it very much. Except for those 4 instances, which do bring the album down, most of this album is pretty good. It’s not as good as Rush’s Presto or Moving Pictures or anything, but mostly it’s pretty good. I don’t think many people really gave this much of a chance (Bryan) and I think it could have turned into a nice little live group. I really wish they woulda toured.
Rating: 79
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