Their discography really does break up evenly into four-album units, divided by live albums, with a coda of one-off albums with five live albums or remixing or remastering or a new Greatest Hits or or or or – one of those releases, like the afterbirth after a really satisfying shit, when you wipe up, pull up your pants, wash up, walk back to work before realizing you’re not quite done yet and you have to do it all over again. The coda isn’t necessarily bad.

1981-87 is my favorite Rush era by a country mile. 1974-76 is charming and has my favorite Rush album (Fly By Night), but the consistent quality isn’t there. In the second quarter, the music is better but I long ago played the best material, which wasn’t all that good to begin with, out. The fourth quarter has some good modern rock that I actually like a lot, like how (the old, overrated) Neil Young has never had a fallow artistic period to his (reasonable) fans. Of the first, I prefer All the World’s a Stage because I don’t have time for stuff like “Need Some Love” in my life. Of the second quarter, I probably have two serious listenings of Exit… Stage Left left in me after the one I’m about to start, and outside a discography run I don’t think I’m going to relisten to the albums ever.

Different Stages, who cares. It suffers from a subtler CDitis than a 65-minute DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince album: you can have an LP set with entire double albums of music, one from each period, but it would have been exorbitantly priced for all the packaging, design, and limitations imposed by weight and dimensions, probably having to be special ordered to be made economical. The album came in a slim paper set of three plastic discs. As such, the ambition is a little higher than the execution, and given they’re increasingly one-off modern rock albums, I prefer to just listen to the albums. I see listens for all of them anead. As for the rest, fuck Vapour Trails, Snakes and Ladders is good, and Clockwork Angels has been on my backlist literally since it came out but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

But yeah, that magical third quadrant:

Signals – their best album, this or Fly By Night, which are incomparably different. All the singles (originally typed signals) are great and the deeper cuts are generally good. Nothing is embarrassing.

Grace Under Pressure – their best album of Rush as outright synth-pop. You know my love for the genre so you can guess how I feel about this.

Power Windows – Eh, a bit too guitar-y, from my memory. “The Big Money” (goofy as hell song, btw) establishes the mood as a guitar-rock album that uses keyboards rather than a lush, keyboard-centric pop group and it makes me a sad panda. I think I’ll go on a Rush discography run sometime soon. It might lift me out of my musical doldrums. “Marathon” vs. Iron Maiden - “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner”, bros?

Hold Your Fire – Not as bad as the rap it gets. Even “Tai Shan” is only embarrassing if you understand English, unlike Geddy’s castrato squeals in “The Big Money”. The big problem with the album is that it was made for adult-contemporary / top-40 radio, not rock, and it sounds the most like mainstream rock of any of them. It’s more listenable than Presto and I need to give it another listen because my recollection isn’t 100% here.

The albums had fantastic singles and strong album tracks so they’re easily preferred over A Show of Hands.