a farewell to kings (1977) - rush: mercury records, SRM-1-1184

Success - especially massive, unexpected, and rapid success - can be as much curse as blessing. On the one hand it brings fame, fortune, redemption, validation for all the work, and freedom. But then again, it also brings with it the “What have you done for me lately” type of expectations of more and better success. This is certainly true in music, where perhaps the most insulting insult with which one can have insulted a band is calling them a One Hit Wonder.

So it was with Rush in 1977. The year before, the boys released 2112, which was a seismic event that launched the trio into the stratosphere, like an Ayn Rand-fueled missile, transforming Rush into RUSH!. After the initial celebration subsided, the boys were back in the studio faced with the pressure of following up. But this time, for the very first time, they were completely free to do whatever they wanted musically. And what they wanted to do was, in a way, regress.

Side 1: A Farewell To Kings Xanadu
Side 2: Closer To The Heart Cinderella Man Madrigal Cygnus X-1

Up to this point the band had been steadily evolving along the path of overly-long, overly-complex, overly-pretentious, and overly-conceptual music. Songs (or song clusters) would routinely cover at least one side of vinyl and were inextricably tied to the songs preceding and succeeding it.

However, Farewell to Kings sees a sudden and definite ebbing of the band’s progvolution. Instead of a single ponderous concept album, with songs composed of multiple movements, covering entire sides, Kings instead features songs only tangentially related to one another, often clocking in at a very radio-friendly sub-4 minutes.

That’s not to say that Kings isn’t a prog album, because it is. All of the prog touchstones are present, from the Tolkienesque imagery to multi-movement compositions to poxy poetry - there’s no mistaking, this is prog.

But at the same time it isn’t, in that while the songs all loosely relate to a central theme (of overcoming the control of a faceless power stagnating under its overwhelming inertia), the relationship between the songs doesn’t go beyond that common thread. There is no connection between the songs. Other than the main idea, Farewell to Kings has nothing connecting it to Xanadu, which has nothing connecting it to Closer to the Heart which is unconnected to Cygnus X-1. That's nothing like the common thread in 2112, where each song was related to the others in the same way each of the paragraphs of this post is related to the others.

Another difference in Kings is the emergence of synths to prominence in the music. The band’s new found freedom allowed them to experiment and indulge themselves with new sounds, and the boys (Geddy, in particular) had developed a rather strong fetish for synthesizers and electronic enhancements. The presence of synthesizers, along with more accessible song length and structure, was a preview of the next phase of Rush..

I haven’t listened to Farewell to Kings all the way through for a number of years, and hearing it again confirmed my initial feeling about this album at my first listen: It’s a good album, but not great. For me the ultimate test of whether and album is good or not is simple: when listening to it, does the whole seem greater than the sum of the parts or not? By that I mean, do the individual songs gain from the context of the others, or can any song basically stand alone without the one before or after it? With Farewell to Kings, the answer is unequivocally that the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Up next: A ton of fun with a trumpet and a strumpet.