Rush had been no totally different to anybody else in augmenting their sound with synths within the 80s, however with 1984’s Grace Beneath Strain they did so in a method that sounded unforced and legitimately modern. And regardless of having fun with a historically rock-leaning fanbase, the brand new strategy discovered the group comfortably getting into the High 5 in Britain and Canada, whereas additionally going High 10 within the US, due to an album that wasn’t solely totally fashionable in sound, however in subject material too.
Over three many years after its launch, Grace Beneath Strain continues to talk to modern issues.
Hearken to Grace Beneath Strain proper now.
Head-swimmingly evocative
A sure “new broom” mentality knowledgeable Grace Beneath Strain’s genesis. Eager to discover the potential of stirring recent blood into the inventory, the band amicably parted methods with their long-time producer Terry Brown, who had manned the studio for each Rush album since 1975’s Fly By Night time. Manufacturing duties this time spherical ended up being cut up between the band themselves and engineer Peter Henderson, mainly famous for having produced, engineered, and blended Supertramp’s multi-platinum behemoth, Breakfast In America. Henderson stepped into the breach after plans to work with Steve Lillywhite fell by way of: a fortnight earlier than recording was because of start, Lillywhite controversially opted to provide Easy Minds’ Sparkle In The Rain as an alternative.
After a reportedly galvanizing interval of pre-production, recording occurred in Le Studio in Morin-Heights, Quebec, between November 1983 and March 1984. Grace Beneath Strain was accordingly launched on April 12, 1984, only one month after the periods concluded: if it now sounds of its time, it does so in probably the most evocative, head-swimming method.
An urge for escape
What roots the album so tantalizingly within the mid-80s, greater than all of the refrain and flanger pedals, synths, digital percussion, and headless Steinberger basses mixed, is the reflexive gloom of drummer Neil Peart’s embattled, fretful lyrics. Mere weeks earlier than Grace Beneath Strain’s launch, Nena’s English-language model of the talismanic “99 Luftballoons” was nonetheless at No.1 within the UK singles charts – a sweetly-intentioned zeitgeist-capturer that expressed the nuclear paranoia which was a literal hot-button matter in one of many Chilly Battle’s chilliest eras.
Album opener “Distant Early Warning” is an illustrative living proof: a dystopia travelogue, pitted with acid rain, which deftly nests parental issues about an offspring’s vulnerability to malign influences (“You sometimes drive me crazy/But I worry about you”) inside a extra common disquisition about powerlessness within the faces of imminent ruination. The tune’s Dr. Strangelove-referencing video, that includes a baby sitting astride a missile, ran with the temporary wholeheartedly.
The Chilly Battle additionally casts a dank shadow over compositions that invoke clear warnings from historical past: the concentration-camp state of affairs of “Red Sector A,” impressed by the testimony of Geddy Lee’s mom and father (survivors of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, respectively), or “Between The Wheels,” which paraphrases “The Star-Spangled Banner” to chilling impact in its distillation of the cycle of distress perpetuated by human battle: “We can fall from rockets’ red glare/Down to “Brother, can you spare…’”
Elsewhere on the album, “Afterimage” is a homily to folks and instances previous, touchingly devoted to Le Studio tape op Robbie Whelan, who had just lately been killed in a automotive crash. “The Body Electric,” in the meantime, set to a colossal, gravitational, mechanistic rhythm, harks again to one among Peart’s pet themes: the urge for escape and deliverance – besides on this occasion the escapee is “An android on the run/Seeking freedom.” The tune’s “1-0-0-1-0-0-1” binary code refrain was an thought later borrowed, whether or not knowingly or not, by Flight Of The Conchords for the “solo” in “The Humans Are Dead.”
Persevering with dignity
The existential sorrow and contrastingly flinty resolve in Peart’s lyrics all through the album are mirrored in minor-key melodies that are nonetheless delivered by the trio with a lean, fleet-footed muscularity. (The uneven, offbeat guitar chording in “The Enemy Within” is a spit away from XTC, The Beat, or The Police.) On Grace Beneath Strain Rush sound, if something, unencumbered by any compulsion to go “heavy”: the heaviness is all within the lyrics, delivered by Geddy Lee with a new-found maturity, spending much less time on the fringe of his vary and extra time inhabiting the physique of the songs. Peart’s drumming is snappy, authoritative, and vigorous, and Lifeson’s characteristically ringing, open chords obtain a widescreen impact.
With a title that neatly encapsulates the album’s subtext of persevering – with hope and nice dignity – within the face of insurmountable odds, over three many years after its launch, Grace Beneath Strain strikes a thoughtfully modern word in a brand-new period of age-old paranoia.
Rush’s Grace Beneath Strain could be purchased right here.
