Rush’s Grace Under Pressure: Super Deluxe Edition reviewed – an ’80s evolution expanded

In his memoir My Effin’ Life, Geddy Lee expresses his regret about a choice made during the making of Rush’s 10th album, 1984’s Grace Under Pressure. That was the decision to cut his “witchy tresses” in favour of a more ’80s-appropriate hairstyle. No-one was pleased with the results and Lee’s efforts to grow it out again during the subsequent tour resulted in “an unfortunate bonnet that got me elected to the Mullet Hall of Fame”.

Decades later, the sound of his cringing can still be heard. “Why my wife didn’t step in and save me from myself is beyond me,” he laments. Yet as is amply demonstrated by the latest entry in the Canadian band’s 40th-anniversary series of expanded editions, Rush adapted to the new decade’s changes and challenges far more adroitly than the vast majority of their prog-era peers. What’s more, they did so without undergoing the kind of drastic overhaul that Yes did in the hands of Trevor Horn, or Genesis had by embracing Phil Collins’ affinities for pop and R&B.

Instead, Rush’s incorporation of new technology – like the PPG Wave 2.2 synth and the electronic drums so fundamental to the sound here – and adoption of more concise song structures felt more evolutionary than revolutionary, even if this same trio had situated themselves among the priests of Syrinx and sentient trees only a few years before.

With the tightly coiled displays of intensity and dexterity on “Distant Early Warning” and “The Body Electric”, the band achieves a match of force and velocity that was only intermittently attained on 1982’s Signals. Whereas that album had too strongly favoured the synths over Alex Lifeson’s guitar heroics, Grace Under Pressure benefits from a better calibrated balance of digital and analogue, a strength that’s further emphasised here in Terry Brown’s new mixes for the Super Deluxe Edition. Brown’s contributions constitute a karmic correction for a disturbance in the Rush-verse, the band having originally decided to end their eight-album relationship with the producer due to their dissatisfaction with Signals.

After Brown’s planned replacement Steve Lilywhite took a gig with Simple Minds shortly before the sessions’ start date, Rush hastily hired Peter Henderson, the British producer and engineer whose credits include Supertramp’s Breakfast In America. According to Lee’s liner notes, Henderson’s disinclination to serve as argument-settler made Rush’s painstaking methodology even more painful. “The whole thing took a major chunk out of us as a band and me as a human being,” Lee writes, describing how months of quibbling over tiny differences between takes and mixes left the band “emotionally and physically spent”.

Even so, that mood of weary exasperation may have suited the darker nature of the songs, another aspect that makes Grace Under Pressure seem well suited to our times. Cold War-era political tensions and anxieties about other threats to humanity’s survival course through Neil Peart’s lyrics for “Distant Early Warning” and “Between The Wheels”. The harrowing “Red Sector A” draws from the Holocaust experience of Lee’s mother, which he powerfully recounted in My Effin’ Life. “Afterimage” starkly conveys the band’s grief over the recent loss of Robbie Whelan, a friend who’d worked with the band at Le Studio in Quebec.

Just as these flickers of anger and despair add grit to the high-tech sheen, the performances feel equally human in their thorny complexity. Accorded more space than on Signals, Alex Lifeson’s guitar continually punches through the mix, especially on the driving rocker “Kid Gloves”. A few years on from embracing their new-wave predilections on 1981’s Moving Pictures, Rush continued to expand their palette with the Police-like, semi-reggae of “The Enemy Within” and the Remain In Light-ish avant-funk of “Red Lenses”.

Throughout, there’s a sound of a group keenly aware of their own musical moment, taking in new elements and repurposing them to their advantage. Originally recorded at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens in September 1984, the live tracks here further demonstrate the band’s fortitude, along with their astonishing ability to wield all the necessary pedals and contraptions to reproduce their music onstage. The Super Deluxe Edition offers a more complete version of the show than those included in the earlier Grace Under Pressure concert video and the Replay X 3 DVD set, newly retooled by Brown in a variety of mixes and formats, including Dolby Atmos.

All that work will be appreciated by listeners eager to analyse the Peart solo near the concert’s climax, a moment noted in a reproduced setlist as “NEIL”. Suffice to say, the all-caps feels entirely fitting. Lee and Lifeson’s upcoming North American tour with Anika Nilles in their late drummer’s place gives Rush a new chance to re-engage with the present, much as they did with great determination and intelligence here.