Every band has to start somewhere. What’s amazing about Rush, after listening to their self-titled first release, is that it’s so far removed from their later core releases, and they went through such a giant transformation by their second album. If you take their second or third album and remove the monster-solo prog-rock geekfests and the Tolkein-meets-Ayn Rand lyrics, you still aren’t anywhere near this one. It’s a miracle this obscure band, scraping by on a self-released album, even got the chance at a second one.

The easiest way to sonically describe this is Led Zeppelin clone with a chick singer. The band blows through eight numbers that are straight-up, simple, forgettable AOR rock. And I guess that’s forgivable. I mean, listen to some of AC/DC’s early stuff and it sure isn’t Back in Black. It’s barely metal as we know it today. Same with KISS, same with a lot of other bands that started before things really got categorized and defined. So here are some tracks of simple bar-band blues, and that’s fine. And Neil Peart wasn’t in the band yet, so you’re trading the all-time best drum wizard for regular old guy John Rutsey clonking away the basic beats. (Rutsey quit the band after their first release, saying that they weren’t going anywhere, and also citing his diabetes as being a problem with extended touring. He, oddly enough, got into amateur bodybuilding after he dropped out of music.)

Probably the biggest problem on this album is the big love-it-or-hate-it of Rush, being Geddy Lee’s vocals. Some people are immediately turned off by his high-register singing, which sounds slightly feminine or falsetto. I personally don’t mind his singing a lot of the time, but there are usually a couple of runs or notes per album that grate at me a bit. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff on this first album falls under that category. Maybe it’s because there’s a lot more “oooh yeeah” phrasing in the hard rock style, and by the time they started singing more sedate stuff about Dungeons and Dragons and not “baby-baby” bar music, he stopped doing that.

There are a couple of gems in this album. One is the song “Working Man,” which became a live staple for a while, and rocks out well. It also, like many of the songs here, shows that Alex Lifeson is a damn good guitarist, and can really jam away like he just got done listening to a bunch of Hendrix and wants to do similar work. This song is the reason a DJ in Ohio started spinning the record, playing the song on Friday afternoons to their working-class fans. (This later resulted in the band’s deal with Mercury records, and the wider rerelease of this album.) “Finding My Way” is a good opener, and “In the Mood” is funny, but maybe a bit corny. The other stuff is so un-Rush-like it’s only interesting as a historical note. Probably the most interesting thing about this material is that it deals with straight-up, hey-baby sex stuff, which became taboo as the band went on to talk about inevitable nuclear war and starships vanishing into black holes.

The album itself has some interesting history, in that it was pieced together from two different studios. The band’s first release, a cover of the song “Not Fade Away,” was recorded with an original B-side. This work was done at Toronto’s Eastern Studios (where Gordon Lightfoot was putting down most of his mid-seventies albums, too) in a series of graveyard shifts, and included two other original songs, plus the versions of “In the Mood” and “Take a Friend” that ended up on the LP. The band also laid down some more skeletal work on other songs on the studio’s 8-track before becoming dissatisfied and moving to Toronto Sound Studios and self-producing the rest of the album. No record company would touch the album or the “Not Fade Away” single, so the band and manager Ray Daniels formed Moon Records to release both. When the album got picked up by Mercury, long-time Rush producer Terry Brown re-mixed the album into the form most of us have heard.

(Also worth noting: in 2008, the band found an old tape with a different version of “Working Man”, including an alternate solo. This was released directly to the Rock Band video game, and then later released on iTunes. It’s worth the 99 cents to hear this slightly different version if you’re a Rush fanatic.)

All I can really say about this album is that it got a lot better really fast. Completists will obviously want check this out, but it’s a tough sell for the casual fan of the later music. If you’re only familiar with “Tom Sawyer” and newer, a better dip into the old catalog would be starting with Fly By Night, and catching the couple of good tunes here on the first live album with Neil on the drums.

Rating: 6.5

[I feel I need to put some kind of disclaimer on this for giving a Rush album a 6.5 and I’m sure I’m going to hear about it. So, sorry or whatever.]

Every band has to start somewhere. For prog-rockers Queensryche, they begin with a very NWOBHM-styled four-song EP. And it wasn’t even the same band initially - they were known as The Mob then, and Geoff Tate was enlisted to sign on the project, prior to him taking the full-time role as a frontman. The band recorded this release primarily as a demo, in a series of graveyard shift recording sessions at a local studio. They shopped it around with no avail, but when Kim and Diana Harris, owners of a Seattle record store, got a listen, they formed 206 records (206 being Seattle’s area code), managed the group, changed the band’s name, and released the demo as an EP in 1983. It got a huge following in Europe (thanks to Kerrang! magazine), and by the end of the year, the band signed on with EMI records and became a national act.

For as much as these four tracks don’t sound like Queensryche, they still do. The opener, “Queen of the Reich,” starts with Geoff Tate holding this impossibly long note in operatic style, and then launches into something similar to older Iron Maiden. The songs “Nightrider” and “Blinded” are structurally a bit more strange, and not straightforward rockers. The album finishes up with “The Lady Wore Black,” a slower tune that still rocks and shows the kind of direction the band wanted to go, with more progressive leanings and longer songs.

This is obviously a demo recorded by an unsigned band on a budget, and not an established act who is trying to explore their musicianship. It’s all very simple stuff here, without the extended set pieces, massive overdubs, or complicated introductions that the band would find later. The band clearly came from a NWOBHM background, with more influences in the metal area than any art-rock leanings. Even their photo resembles a band that probably plays Scorpions covers out of small bars in Federal Way, instead of the great prog-rock band that they later became.

For the longest time, if you bought this CD, it would come with “The Prophecy” as a bonus track, which is an excellent outtake from the Rage For Order sessions. With the later remaster, this EP now includes another seven live tracks, rescued from an old Warning-era live-in-Japan laserdisc that is no longer available. I’m an old fart with the older 5-song version (I actually had the tape, which repeated the same five songs on both sides), and I’ve always thought of the album as a good starting point for the band. I’m not sure what I’d think of the same release as a catch-all for a bunch of other stuff. It’s nice that they’ve added more bonus material, but for whatever reason, I like thinking of this as the same, little, 20-minute tape I got when I was first getting into the band.

Rating: 8

Some metalheads may remember guitarist Chris Poland as one of the original guitarists in the band Megadeth. He appeared on their first two albums before getting fired by Dave Mustaine for his excessive drug use. (And you know if your drug use is excessive compared to a mid-1980s Dave Mustaine, you’ve got some serious problems.) After getting clean, he did a brief stint as bassist in the Circle Jerks, and then came back to metal and did this solo album. He’s since done more work in the Jazz-fusion-y direction with his band Ohm.

This ten-track (or nine-track - if you have the first release on tape, it won’t have the track “Heinous Interruptus”) album is an all-instrumental attempt to showcase Poland’s playing with melodic guitar that alternates thick rhythm with a lot of weaved textures of fast leads and some occasional acoustic. He plays everything on the album, bass and guitars, with his brother Mark on the drums.

Even though Poland originally worked with a straightforward thrash band, all of the compositions here are more jazz-metal oriented, more similar to someone more Joe Satriani. The guitar work is very modal, but it does sport more screaming leads in places. Each song has very memorable structure, like in “The Fall of Babylon,” which starts with acoustic guitar, then builds for four minutes, occasionally dipping back to the unamplified guitar before he wraps it up and bookends again with the acoustic. “Row of Crows” starts with a romping riff that then pulls to very soaring guitar sounds, then speeds up the drums on the way out, like a car driving like a bat out of hell toward the horizon. Probably one of the best tracks is the ending, “Khazad Dum,” which starts off minor and almost sinister, and at the end, completely takes off with quick double-bass drum and an almost constant solo that leaps to the finish.

This is an extremely impressive little album. Like I said, it weighs in at only about 35 minutes, but it’s the kind of thing I always, immediately have to listen to a second time. The most amazing thing about this album is that I found it as a cut-out in a dollar store in 1993, and for the longest time, I heard absolutely nothing else about it. Right after it came out, Enigma records went under, which effectively buried the album, There was a CD reissue in 1998, and a new reissue in 2002 with two extra tracks. They also released a live version of the album in 2007, originally recorded on a truncated 1991 live tour. I think people on the internet have spread the word on this little gem, though. It’s well worth finding, although I usually skip the bonus tracks and go for just the original stuff I found so awe-striking back when I first heard this.

Rating: 9

When I first got into Rush, my friend Derik Rinehart (now an accomplished prog-rock drummer) made me a tape from his LPs, with this on one side and Moving Pictures on the other. Of course, I played the hell out of both sides, and I probably liked Moving Pictures a lot more because it rocked, and everyone likes it more, right? But I still listened to Grace Under Pressure because I didn’t want to waste my precious Duracells rewinding the D-90 in my walkman, and the album burned it into my brain. And I’m not sure if it’s the content of the album, or the thoughts back to that era, but when I think of this LP, I think of a sterile bleakness. My pal Simms once told me, “It’s the Cold War, man. I love it!” And maybe he’s right. But it’s something that now, 20 years later, I can’t completely reconcile when I try to decide how meaningful this 39 minutes and 26 seconds of music is to me.

Here’s what might be throwing me: This is the first album since their sophomore effort that wasn’t produced by Terry Brown. It’s said the switch to Peter Henderson had to do more with accessibility, which seems strange following Moving Pictures, which produced the only song for which 90% of the population knows of the band at all. (Henderson was previously known as the producer of Supertramp’s biggest albums, as well as an engineer for Frank Zappa, among others.) And I guess the soundscape might match pop back then a bit better. (It’s also worth noting that Steve Lillywhite was supposed to produce this album, but pulled out of the project at the last minute, almost derailing the entire project. Henderson was their last-second replacement.)

The easiest way to describe this album is to first go into the differences between it and previous albums. First, there’s not a lot of bass on this album. And while I mean thin-sounding bass, I also mean that there’s at least one song with NO bass, where Geddy Lee just plays synth and sings. And there’s a lot more synth on this album. Previously, the band just filled out their sound with bass pedals, and Geddy reached over to play a line or two here and there, like a solo opposite from Alex’s guitars. But here, there are more places where MIDI madness has taken over not only Geddy’s performances, but also those of the guitar. This album is the first to have markedly less guitar, or more “atmospheric” sounds of droning chords for a measure or two at a time, but less leads and powered strumming. The drums are still there, and Neil Peart still lives behind the 97-piece drum kit, but his playing is much more methodical and exact. There aren’t many stray or extra beats anywhere, and certainly no heroics in the solo department. It’s all very exact. And I guess that reminds me of the era, of everything becoming so exact. Computerized watches! Fuel injection! Mechanized assembly! Welding robots! 2000 would be here soon, and we’d all be living on the moon, so make your prog-rock as efficient and exact as possible.

The other thing is that this album takes a rather dark turn toward social and political issues. The opening song, “Distant Early Warning,” describes how the nuclear war is going to start in moments, and what humanity has brought onto itself. “Red Sector A” (the bassless song, for those keeping track) talks about concentration camps in World War II, a place where Geddy Lee’s parents survived before fleeing to Canada. “Between the Wheels,” “Kid Gloves,” and “Red Lenses” are all political gesturing to the superpower-driven Cold War.

All of these songs are interesting sonic paintings of the time. But if you’ve ever seen them performed live, they’re also very tedious. I seem to remember a videotape of a concert from this era, and it was seriously like sitting through the Canadian Socialist Worker’s Party convention. I’m surprised that “Distant Early Warning” remained a staple for live sets as long as it did. For me, I was always thankful for this song, because it was a good time during their live sets to get up and go to the can. (This was later replaced with “Nobody’s Hero.”)

Oddly enough, the album as a whole seems to be greater than its parts, despite the fact that it’s not a concept album in the strictest sense. When you play it from the beginning to end, it flows well, and has an even sound that carries you easily. When I’m working on some writing or taking a long car trip and I need something to kill some time, this album always seems to end up in the player. There are songs that I like (“Red Lenses,” “Between the Wheels,” “Afterimage”), and like I said, it’s a very true look at what 1984 was like for me (no Orwellian pun intended.) The only reason I can’t give this a higher rating is that it doesn’t rock. Go listen to “Tom Sawyer” or “YYZ” and then listen to “Red Sector A.” Where are the guitars? The solos? The rock? Rush is a rock band! They took themselves too seriously on this one, and that’s why I’m saying it’s only slightly above-average.

Rating: 8

I’m surprised I didn’t throw this album out a long time ago. I’m not saying that it’s that repulsive, I’m just saying that it never really clicked with me, and it went away in a box for a long time, until recently, when it popped into my head and I had to dig it out of storage to give it another listen. Then I had to get on google and see exactly why I ever had a copy of the record in the first place.

Here’s the deal. There was this contemporary christian artist called Steve Taylor who had a decent solo career but pissed some people off for making fun of the jesus types a bit, including a song called “I Blew Up the Clinic Real Good.” This was followed by a band called Chagall Guevara that’s best-described as CCM alt-rock, and their debut had some degree of mainstream crossover success. When label MCA did their annual juggling of the bands, CG faltered and split. Taylor went on to discover and produce Sixpence None the Richer, and that’s where his story ends very happily, but it’s where Passafist’s story begins.

Chagall Guevara guitarists Lynn Nichols and Dave Perkins reinvented themselves as the Caruso Twins, Waco and Reno, and picked up John Elliott of Dessau, a Nitzer Ebb-like dance/industrial band, and two members of the band Afrikan Dreamland. This is one of those combinations that could only work in a city like Nashville, filled with session players with lots of time on their hands and numbers in their rolodexes. The group somehow got a contract, and did this one-shot studio album, somehow capturing a brief sample of 1994, while also proving what kind of strange albums get made when semi-famous people from other bands somehow roll the dice correctly and get a chance to go into the studio.

The easiest way to describe this seven-track LP, aside from the staple “alternative,” would be to call it a very studio-sterile industrial, taking every possible approach to be as widely liked by as many people as possible. It seems like they wanted an album that would go to dance floors, but maybe yield a single, but get picked up by some people just cruising the CMJ for good college rock, but not offend the CCM crowd and possibly get a few purchases from old Chagall Guevara fans. That ultimately means the album is so soft and pliable, I’m not sure anyone could like it.

There are a lot of obvious tongue-in-cheek religious or social awareness issues painted across this album like ketchup on a four-year-old’s plate. Even the band name - Passafist - well, I’m not going to explain it, it’s so stupid. There’s a song called “Glock” that’s about guns. “Christ of the Nuclear Age” is like some kind of REM-like jolly singing, a quick departure from all of those electric drums and Skinny Puppy posturing on the other songs. All lyrics are heavily basted in effects processing, with the Korn-like “singing through a bullhorn” used frequently. Guitars are all over the songs, but more rhythmic than metallic. They even cover the Stones song “Street Fighting Man,” in a very pathetic way. Most of their songs sound like if Nokia or Ford or Revlon were making a commercial and needed “Street Fighting Man,” but couldn’t pay the Rolling Stones, so they got Anonymous Studio Band #57 to re-record the song, and a producer said “Make it edgier! we need to sell these cars to kids!” Add that to the fact that the seven songs here barely sound like they were recorded in the same genre, let alone by the same band, and you have a pretty uneven and unlistenable album.

The one song that is interesting closes up the album, and it’s called “The Dr. Is In.” It’s a ten-and-a-half minute song that’s based on and filled with samples from the dark comedy Doctor Strangelove, which is of course about nuclear war. At first, the song is very mellow, with slower drums, ebbing guitar, and almost spoken lyrics that sound like Roger Waters. It also uses an occasional chorus in the song, anonymously singing an “oooooh” here or there. It seriously sounds like some lost Pink Floyd song about nuclear war, maybe by the new ‘Floyd. It’s not bad, though. Then, as the “countdown” continues in the pseudo-concept song, the drums get more percussive, and it switches to more of the bullhorn lyrics, as the guitars get louder and frenetic. It all leads up to the big nuclear blast, and not a bad little song. It does beg the question as to why you’d write a song about nuclear war with the USSR a few years after the whole thing fell apart, but what can you do.

I don’t even know if you can get this album anymore, but even if someone handed it to you, it’s probably not worth more than a cursory scan of the first six tracks and a single listen of the last one. I enjoy listening to this only in that it’s one of those strange curiosities, like Crystal Pepsi or Laserdisc movies, that seemed like a really good time to an executive, and then he probably lost his job at the end of the year over it. I am glad I didn’t throw out this CD, but only because I’d still be trying to figure out who did “The Dr. Is In,” and I’d never find out.

Rating: 6 (but an 8 for the last song)