Here I sit trying--no, make that desperately trying--to get a “wave” going with two flies that’ve hitched a ride on an ice cube that’s bobbing ever so gently up and down in a glass of Old Crow I’ve been attempting--no, make that desperately attempting--to guzzle since the onset of my daily boredom.
Oh my gawd! One of the flies has just committed suicide (or would you call it insecticide?). No matter. The simple fact is the fly just shrugged its hairy shoulders, twirled a thousand or two of its eyes and in a barely audible voice moaned, “Ta hell with it, I don’t need this crap anymore.” It flew straight up in the air, did a magnificently choreographed loop-de-loop, and dove, with amazing velocity and great determination, smack into the lake of softly swelling hooch. “Now that is bored,” I thought to myself.
Perked up by this unselfish act of insectual existentialism, I immediately doubled my efforts at getting a wave going with the remaining fly, In between agitated coaxings, video clips of David Hedison, delicately maneuvered sips of bourbon and an occasional answer to nature’s call, I faced the problem of criticizing the new Rush album, Power Windows.
I once thought of Rush as an “amazingly crispless” band, and my opinion really hasn’t changed that much since then. Their homophonic pseudo-metalocity, mottled on occasion with an interesting lyrical ahem from Neil Peart, did nothing to inspire the dogs of my greasy heart or perk my metal-punchy ears. However, mellowness like the carcinogenic slime that it is, does, on rare occasion, overcome us all. So I find myself in moments of extreme concentration actually, begrudgingly, liking this latest effort by these hodad metaloids.
Maybe if I show the fly a piece of old meat it’ll play with me...no, that didn’t work.
Musically speaking, Power Windows is infectious, driving, slick beyond a reasonable doubt, adverb inducing, and once in awhile unnervingly possessed of blinding likeability. Did I say that already?
Maybe if I go to the cemetery and dig up a corpse finger or two and wave it under its nose, the fly’ll respond...no, that didn’t work either.
Lyrically, Neil Peart’s (certainly one of the great names in rock’n’roll) psycho-polemical musings run the gamut from lofty mouthiness (“The Big Money,” “Grand Designs,” and peripherally, “Middletown Dreams”) to glaring gobbledygook (“Marathon,” and “Manhattan Project”) slamming by album’s end into the concrete wall of just plain annoying (“Mystic Rhythms” and “Emotion Detector”). One positive thing lyrically is that here at last is a borderline metal LP without the obligatory love song a.k.a. fantasy epic into the Stygian depths of teen brooding and the inevitable link up with the rhythms of Tophet...
Sigh.
Guess what? I just got a magnifying glass and looked closely at the fly on the ice cube. It’s dead. It must’ve cut its throat ’cause next to it is a little knife and a tiny pool of insect blood. Damn the little bugger! Now what am I to do fer fun? Hey, maybe I can get a wave going with the neighborhood dogs...
Well, to sum up a little, Power Windows as an LP doesn’t eat the big one and Rush, though still “crispless,” are no longer amazingly so. I suppose some progress has been made after all...on a scale of one to two, I’ll give it a one.
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