Moving Pictures

Alguna vez, cuando quize ser periodista, escribí una pequeña reseña sobre este disco. Podría escribir 5,000 palabras sobre él, pero someto éstas para su consideración:
It can be hard for a neophyte to pick a specific recording for proper introduction to Rush, as their career spans 17 studio albums. Most fans would point said newbie to Moving Pictures, the best selling Rush album—four times platinum in the U.S.—and the recording that defined the band’s fortunes thereafter.
At its release time, Moving Pictures was considered to be a heavy metal album mostly because of the wave of bands making indentations in the British charts and how different the album sounded compared to other releases. This assertion is wrong, for it was the first time bassist and lead vocalist Geddy Lee toned down his signature shriek and guitarist Alex Lifeson focused his guitar sound more than ever before. A good example of this “mellower” Rush is “Vital Signs,” where there are no over-the-top guitar riffs, intricate synthesizer arrangements or odd time signatures.
In the U.S., the incipient MTV cable network was “essentially two years behind the curve ” in their music programming and taste-making influence, and relied heavily on performance films such as Rush’s own “Tom Sawyer” video. This fact made the band more accessible to American audiences, who started to rely on the network for their perception of “cool.”
The album starts with four fundamental songs of the Rush catalogue—“Tom Sawyer” being the staple of the band to this date—and finishes with three of the better songs from the aforementioned. “Through the Camera Eye,” a 10-minute etude of daily life in London and New York City, has every trait that should be important in a song: solid production values, clear and balanced sound, meaningful lyrics, a striking equilibrium of major and minor keys modulating to evoke a sentiment, and virtuosic playing.
“Witch Hunt” is the production piece of the album. The band has admitted to a heavy rerecording and retooling of the song. Lyrically, it is an indictment of the mob mentality and a song that remains current with our times. Lifeson had never been so sinister in his arrangements and choice of sounds.
Sonically, Moving Pictures introduces electronic nuances to the compositions. At the time, electronic instruments became more available—namely Yamaha’s synthesizers and sequencers—and Rush adopted the technology for this production. Lee admits to writing most of “Tom Sawyer’s” music on synthesizer; this practice became standard for every album thereafter.
Also, Moving Pictures started hinting at the band’s composing style throughout the 1980s. As Rush started to become more accepted in the musical mainstream, their musical focus shifted to New Wave-style arrangements; short and concise, relying more heavily on layered keyboard tracks and voice multiplications.
Arguably, intellectual rock ‘n’ roll reached its zenith with this recording. Every Rush knockoff band—A Perfect Circle, Dream Theatre, Coheed & Cambria—has tried to emulate Moving Pictures at some point during their careers to no avail.