Rush
Hold Your Fire

THE REVIEW

Among the albums recorded in the '80s, Hold Your Fire ('87) is the one that most exaggerates the strengths and weaknesses of the music recorded by Rush during that era: I thus warn the period's “detractors” (but can one truly despise Rush?) to refrain from listening to it if they have never heard the album, while I invite those who don't know the band, fans of the trio, or simply the... curious to get this excellent work, perhaps inferior to its predecessors but still worthy of attention, like every recording by the Toronto trio.

As is known, the album ideally closes the third evolutionary phase of the band (Signals - Grace Under Pressure - Power Windows and, indeed, Hold Your Fire), in which Lee, Lifeson, and Peart turned the original prog rock into a more controlled and refined style - more “adult” - without losing the original strengths of their music, namely the feeling, the execution skills, and the ability to create imperishable melodies over texts of rare depth for entertainment rock. Let's immediately say that Hold Your Fire is the first Rush album, thirteen years after their debut release (!), to present some tracks merely as fillers, though alternated with true gems that rightly belong to the empyrean of their production.

Let's start with the masterpieces: among them is the opening "Force Ten," kicked off by a jackhammer, where Geddy Lee's synthesizers and Lifeson's guitar beautifully intertwine: the pop-oriented piece has an excellent chorus, both in text and music, leading the listener to hum profound philosophical reflections. A similar discourse applies to the following "Time Stand Still," where Lee's voice becomes gentle, forgetting the high notes of youth, in an avant-garde techno pop when compared to other recordings of the era, enriched by Aimee Mann's splendid voice as a counterpoint. Declamatory and dramatic is "Mission," though the sound fabric may not be up to the previous pieces, serving Lee's voice, perhaps the true protagonist of the album, relegating "Lifeson" and "Peart" to secondary roles. Exceptional, instead, is "Turn the Page"; introduced by a particularly driving guitar, the song develops up to two peaks represented by the booming synthesizer chords, followed by the progressive acceleration of the chorus; the music, that seems to trace the flow of a river to a waterfall, perfects its fit with the lyrics, inviting to "turn the page" and describing the passage of time as a watercourse flowing from the past to the future. Notice the finesse of the sound effects in the track's final part, where Lee's voice is mixed in such a way as to confuse and "randomize" the text, muddling the timelines of the song itself. "Tai Shan" is instead a splendid piece with more meditative tones, almost a "Mystic Rhythm part II": while the latter track, featured on Power Windows, connected to the African tradition, adding world music touches to the typical Rush sound, "Tai Shan" reconnects with the Orient, explored by Peart in his travels and intellectual wanderings, well supported by the synths.
The other tracks, which I describe more briefly, appear less in line with the quality of Rush's songwriting and almost seem like leftovers from previous albums. "Open Secrets," "Prime Mover," and "High Water" are, in my view, not particularly brilliant, being tracks devoid of peaks from every point of view, while "Second Nature," though supported by an excellent chorus, adds nothing to what was already heard in previous albums or in the better pieces of the same album. "Lock and Key" is a good atmospheric piece, but even on this front, Rush seems to have given their best in previous years.

The final score, balancing the best and worst of the recording, stands at 3/5, though the best pieces, individually considered, are all 5/5. Noteworthy, in any case, is the inside of the CD edition, featuring a splendid photograph of a juggler “holding his fire,” implicitly referencing all the previous album covers of the group: just for enjoyment, the clock behind the juggler shows 9:12 and the photo is taken in the evening... so 21:12, and the memory can't help but return to that splendid 1976... even if, in Peart's words, “every day we're standing in a time capsule, racing down a river from the past; every day we're standing in a wind tunnel facing down the future coming fast.”