I will choose . . . Review on Permanent Waves - Rush

The Spirit of Radio, the first song on the album, sets the stage for a good eighteen minutes of music. How can you hate a song that starts with ''Begin the day with a friendly voice''? You can't. This is easily the poppiest of the songs on the album. Fortunately, in this case, being radio-friendly doesn't preclude it from being a good song. Then comes the gem of the album, ''Freewill,'' the national anthem of secular humanists, Libertarians, and teenage Objectivists alike. The song dismisses pessimists, mystics, and fence-sitters with lyrical scorn. People either love this song or hate it; there's no middle ground. Pick a side, but remember that if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. I will choose a path that's clear; I will choose ''Freewill.'' Third is ''Jacob's Ladder.'' It's mostly instrumental, but like the song's thunderheads, it rumbles in a distant overture, at least until it gets to the closing synthesizers, which sound like some guy alone in his basement with a Casio and too much time on his hands. Unfortunately, that's where the eighteen minutes end, and we still have another eighteen minutes to go. Back in the days when we still used cassettes, this is where we'd flip it over to side two. ''Entre Nous'' isn't terrible, but it doesn't quite live up to the first three songs on the album. Perhaps partially because of the title, it's rather forgettable. Then we have ''Different Strings.'' This is another one of those songs for the Dungeons & Dragons constituency. The stringwork tries to evoke a mixture of Dust In The Wind and Stairway to Heaven, but it can't quite pull it off, and the vocals don't work with it at all. The last song, ''Natural Science,'' begins with running water and seagulls, reminding me that this is a good time to go to the bathroom, so I can skip most of the song and be back in time for the album to begin again with ''The Spirit of Radio.'' Natural Science tries way too hard to sound ethereal in the beginning, then switches to Rush's normal vocals in the middle, just before a frenetic UFO lyric, drum and synth sequence. Then it degenerates into what appears to be a jam session of the emotionally disturbed. Buy this album, I guess. The first half gets an A-plus, even if the second half gets a D. But then, I guess that's what God made fast-forward buttons for.