Caress Of Steel (review)

By David Brown, Record Mirror, February 12, 1977, transcribed by pwrwindows

RUSH: 'Caress Of Steel'
(Mercury 0698)
3 out of 5 stars

The next time someone tells you "all heavy rock music sounds the same" remind them of Rush. Not only are they three well matched forceful musicians but they also come up with some very different themes, let alone the variations.

Caress Of Steel contains some ideal examples such as their short story 'The Necromancer', the strangely inspired 'Bastille Day' - another of those songs that achieves the same sort of emotion as its subject matter, and 'The Fountain Of Lamneth', which takes up the whole of the second side.

While it is true they are not the only heavy rock storytellers, they manage to carry it off with a higher degree of conviction than most. In Alex Lifeson they have a guitarist capable of expressing every mood from calm to terror, and while there are, as with his companions, a few clichés (as in the song 'I Think I'm Going Bald' with its "Now we're so involved, so involved with life"), the overall feel is what really counts.