This next album is good in the car, or anywhere else - and is one of my favourite albums of this or any band.
Disc 274 is...Permanent Waves
Artist: RushYear of Release: 1980
What’s Up With The Cover?: A beautiful woman has her skirt blown up in the foreground, while in the background we see a tsunami wave leaving a path of destruction in its wake. I think. I don't fully get this cover, other than the obvious homage to the "Permanent Waves" album title. I know I like it, and not just because of the fetching model featured (although that helps).
Of note, this is the second album cover in the Odyssey featuring a woman with her skirt up, showing her underwear. The first was Alice Cooper's "Pretties For You" back at Disc 152, which handled the subject matter in a less violent, but far creepier manner.
How I Came To Know It: I knew the song "Spirit of Radio" for years, but it was my friend Kelly playing "Freewill" that not only hooked me on buying this album, but got me started on drilling through Rush's entire collection.
How It Stacks Up: I have eighteen studio albums by Rush, and "Permanent Waves" is tied for first. I love this record.
Rating: 5 stars
"Permanent Waves" is Rush at the height of their considerable talent. Still possessing the incredibly technical arrangements and virtuoso playing of earlier records like "2112", "Farewell to Kings" and "Hemispheres", "Permanent Waves" is all these things, but somehow more accessible to a larger audience.
The album only has six songs, but those six songs are each classics in their own right. The album begins with the hit "Spirit of Radio". In just under five minutes, "Spirit of Radio" sums up all the good and bad about music radio.
As long-time readers will know, I often take shots at radio, and as a band that has largely made songs not friendly to radio, Rush would certainly have been in their right to do the same. Instead, this song is balanced between hope and disappointment. The opening lines:
"Begin the day
With a friendly voice
A companion unobtrusive"
Completely captures my experience listening to the radio driving to work (albeit news radio, in my case). A quiet voice in the car that calms your nerves and sets your mind for the day ahead.
Sheila often tells me about how the song annoys her when Geddy Lee shrieks out how radio also "echoes with the sounds...Of salesmen! Salesmen!". So true, but such a perfect expression of one aspect of radio. The line jars you deliberately, but never loses the song's strong melody in the process.
"Spirit of Radio" winds itself up as more an indictment of the commercialism of modern radio, but the song contains a hopeful thread that radio could be better. For someone like me who long ago gave up on music radio, I'm glad that kernel of optimism remains, even amongst all the gibberish and gaga.
The second song on the album, is one of my all time favourite songs - "Freewill". A song whose lyrics are written by an Objectivist (Peart) but that an avowed Existentialist like me can still completely relate to. It is a song about taking responsibility for your own actions, and not falling back on blaming the heavens for your problems.
"You can choose a ready guide
In some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide
You still have made a choice.
You can choose from phantom fears
And kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose free will."
Every time I hear this song it fills my heart with the fiery fervour to carry on without any crutches, and own all my decisions - good and bad. It also always reminds me of one of my favourite poems by Thomas Hardy, "Hap" which covers the same themes. Since I like to slip a little literature in on my pop culture reviews, here's "Hap" for your reading enjoyment:
"If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"
"Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
"But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain."
Awesome. Also, "Purblind Doomsters" would be a great name for a band. Given that I've just reprinted a Victorian sonnet, it is a good time to point out that amidst all the amazing music in "Freewill" Peart writes the verses in a rhyme scheme of ABCBDDEFFE, and then repeats it. It flows so seamlessly, you'd never notice unless you checked (which I did). Modern poets who think rhyme schemes are outdated should take a lesson from Peart. (Note - my quote above is the chorus, lest you think I can't read a rhyme scheme).
The song "Entre Nous" always makes me think of all those friends who don't necessarily share my belief systems (in various ways) but always offer something for me to think about, and always inspire me to be better. "Entre Nous" says it best:
"The spaces in between
Leave room
For you and I to grow."
Other songs on the album include a depiction of two storm fronts colliding ("Jacob's Ladder"), and a song about tidal pools ("Natural Science") that equates how the creatures in a tidal pool think they know their entire world, just as we foolishly act here on Earth, while floating in a vast universe we can never hope to comprehend.
The themes on this record are big, and Rush delivers on each one with grace and artistry. It is an album I put one when I need a lift, an album that makes me see things in a different light, and an album that makes me appreciate my life. It is a classic album that even years and countless listens later, keeps revealing itself to me.
Best tracks: All tracks, but especially Freewill
3 comments:
You will note that the fetching lady on the cover is coiffed in what is also known as a permanent wave.
This is an absolutely tremendous album.
Not such a great album for the car, if only because it tends to transmute my right foot to lead.
"Freewill" is one of my favourite Rush songs, definitely.
I wonder if Permanent Waves also refers to the lady's hair (she has a perm, which is short for permanent wave).
A couple more things about the cover. The newspaper in the left foreground has the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman", which refers to an infamous incident in which the Chicago Tribune got the election results wrong. Kind of sums up Rush's attitude towards the press at the time.
The waves in the background are of the Galveston Seawall in Texas during a hurricane. The rapid, high waves that occur when high winds whip the water against a uniform hard surface are sometimes called "permanent waves".
And the guy waving in the background is Hugh Syme, who has done pretty much all of Rush's cover art. Since he's in a static image, you could say he's "permanently" waving.
One more thing: when taking an Accoustics course at UVic, our professor discussed sound waves, which are created by the alternating compression and rarefaction of air pressure. It turns out that this is exactly the same process by which weather is created as well, albeit with a substantial time dilation factor. Thus, if you were somehow able slow your perception of time, you would perceive meteorological phenomena - such as "permanent waves" - as music.
Post a Comment