Disc 325 is...Vapor Trails
Artist: Rush
Year of Release: 2002
What’s Up With The Cover?: I have no idea. It might be a tail light - maybe of Neal Peart's motorcycle? That's a wild guess though, and other than that, I've got nothin'. I checked the liner notes, which helpfully advised me that the album was brought to us by the number '3', but provided no comment on the cover art. I give this cover a failing grade.
How I Came To Know It: This was just me drilling through the Rush catalogue. I believe I started actively finishing my Rush collection around the time this one came out in 2002.
How It Stacks Up: I have all 18 of Rush' studio albums. Vapor Trails is somewhere in the middle, but probably in the lower half. I'll say around 11th to 12th, depending on my mood at the time.
Rating: 3 stars.
"Vapor Trails" is a hard album to listen to without the context of how it was made. It is the first album since 1996's "Test For Echo", with the band taking a hiatus after the tragic death's of Neal Peart's daughter and wife in 1997 and 1998.
I'm not very big on biographical context, but knowing this, and knowing that Peart is the band's lyricist, makes it hard not to think about these tragic events when listening to the album. I think it definitely affects the writing, with a lot of the songs having an intensely personal feel.
The songs topics are often emotionally stark, with Peart wondering at what humanity has always wondered at - how can bad things happen to good people. In "Ghost Rider" he sings of riding his motorcycle over 55,000 miles, trying to come to terms with what has happened in his life. Later, in "The Stars Looked Down" he asks the universe a series of questions, where the only response is "and the stars looked down." There are no easy answers.
While I think the most poignant lines on the album comes from the title track, "swept away like voices in a hurricane", my favourite stanza on the topic is from "How It Is":
"It's such a cloudy day
Seems we'll never see the sun
Or feel the day has possibilities
Frozen in the moment -
the lack of imagination
Between how it is and how it ought to be."
The album avoids the mistake of becoming too maudlin, and other topics also abound, including political commentary ("Peaceable Kingdom") and the appreciation of natural beauty ("Earthshine"). Often these also have a close personal connection, Peart choosing to reflect topics back again on his own emotional journey.
Musically, "Vapor Trails" sees a return to the band's hard rock roots, with Alex Lifeson's guitar riffs getting a bit more volume in the mix. I like this; as a prog band, Rush's songs are complicated enough, and giving the guitar a bit more notice makes it easier for my untrained ear to follow along. I can trace outward from the familiar guitar into the outer reaches of the song.
The record's hard rock edge is very hard in places, such as on "Earthshine", and then very relaxed and melodic in other songs like "How It Is". I like both experiences, and the combination I like even more.
In terms of rating, I struggled with this one. "Vapor Trails" is very strong both in terms of the quality of music and lyrics, and as ever, Rush are masters of their craft. At the same time, despite the deeply emotional resonant content of the record, I was not often pulled in like I expected to be. It was close, but I ended up going with 3 stars. I expect that when I'm finished all eighteen albums, "Vapor Trails" will be the dividing line between the 3 and 4 star Rush records. That's how it is, and how it ought to be.
Best tracks: Ceiling Unlimited, Ghost Rider, How It Is, Vapor Trail, Earthshine
2 comments:
I have a somewhat complicated, on-and-off again relationship with this album.
It came out during a period of my life when I really wasn’t that into Rush, and bought it more out of a sense of duty than anything. I listened to it dutifully a couple of times but it really didn’t make much of an impression on me. But a few years later, I had a job where I could sit and listen to music all day while I worked – and this album was on the playlist. I don’t know whether it was listening to it on headphones or being a “captive audience” that did it, but I suddenly got right fucking into Vapor Trails. I still think that there isn’t another album remotely like it.
One thing that grabs me about the album is how textural it is. Rather than the usual harmony-melody-rhythm construction, it sounds like it was pieced together from iterative layers of sound, each layer slightly different than, yet building upon, the previous one. For this reason I find Vapor Trails’s art direction to be complementary and surprisingly affecting. The thick, Expressionistic oil-paint squiggles of the cover and portraits within give an impression of texture and depth.
One explanation for the unique sound could be the way in which the album was created. The songs were more or less assembled via music editing software from studio jams, creating patterns out of a riff that may have been only played once. This form of composition would naturally lend itself to creating “layered” songs.
Unfortunately, Vapor Trails was created during the height of the so-called “Loudness Wars”. Basically, the album was mastered so loud that the sound is digitally distorted. Producers and sound engineers started doing this in the mid-90s because apparently market research groups found that when presented with two similar songs, people will generally prefer the one that’s louder. In other words, we started making albums sound shittier in order to sell more of them. Rush have since acknowledged this problem with the album, however it seems that “digital distortion” was introduced during the mixing process, and thus simply remastering the album would not fix the problem. They do plan to remix the album in its entirety; however no release date has been specified. Anyways, after learning about all this and re-listening to the album with a critical ear, it was kind of spoiled for me. I consider it a great but flawed work. I will reassess when the remixed version comes out.
I think “Earthshine” is lyrically a tribute to Peart’s lost daughter (or wife – or possibly both). Earthshine is a phenomenon where reflected light from the Earth is re-reflected from the occluded part of the Moon (i.e. the part that’s not reflecting light directly from the Sun) back to us. I think he’s drawing an analogy between her memory and the third-hand reflected light, or alternately that his own image is but a reflection of her vanished glory. It’s a beautiful, powerful, wistful image. In a way it reminds me of Plato’s allegory of the cave. We see the faint earthshine and think it’s beautiful, unaware that the light comes from another source. However, even those aware of that fact are unaware that the Sun is the source of it all.
“Peaceable Kingdom” was originally an instrumental, but the producer felt it was such a powerful song that he convinced the band to add lyrics to it. This was in the wake of 9/11, so Neil created a meditation on the people who would commit such an act and the impossibility of communicating with them.
“How It Is” is my favourite track on the album and sees the introduction of yet another new (to the band) instrument – the hammer dulcimer, which is a sort of string percussion instrument played with little hammers. It’s like a piano without the keys.
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“Ghost Rider” is of course Neil’s tale of his 55,000 mile journey via motorcycle through the Americas – from Alaska to Belize and (practically) everywhere in between. To anyone interested in finding out more about Neil’s “travels on the healing road”: read his book of the same name. It’s not necessarily a great book – Peart the prose writer is more entertaining and interesting than profound, and the book reads more as a travelogue than anything else – but I would recommend it to any Rush or Peart fans who wish to get to know the man better and get an interesting insight into his travels.
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