Rush - Fly By Night


Hello, Neil Peart. Ready to make everyone feel incredibly sorry for the poor guy who has to audition 5th after you? Great! Let's take a look at Rush's 2, 3, and 4 albums, they are a spectacular story with a real cliff-hanger of an ending. Fly By Night, Caress of Steel, and the piece de resistance that is 2112. I can't believe someone would part with them in the first place, but i also can't believe i stumbled across them last Friday. Lady Coincidence, she moves in mysterious ways. 

We begin our story after the pretty normal making of Rush's self-titled Hard Rock debut. Only took 'em 6 years to make it, so they're way ahead of schedule. By the time they finished the tour they had the second album written and it was recorded and mixed in 2 weeks. Fly By Night is by my standards a perfectly acceptable random crap album. They felt like this was a new beginning, so they tried to showcase everything they could possibly write, and they totally succeeded. The label wasn't super thrilled at not getting more traditional Hard Rock like the first album, but this is all good stuff to my ears. There are some lovely clumsy parts, and the song about the dogs is silly, but you can hear they really mean it. If we're going to be critical, though, we might have to say this isn't quite wackadoodle enough compared to Uriah Heep, and totally off-putting if Manfred Mann was who you actually came to see. 

Still, as second attempts at a first album go, this is a darned good start. Plus, i think we can all agree that staring into those mesmerizingly yellow strigiform eyes like a rodent about to be devoured is all the more terrifying when you realize it has polar-bear feet. And it's all in gorgeous shades of my favorite blues, so i'm transfixed until their next album chops my head off. Good stuff.

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