Rush - Vapor Trails Remixed

The trouble with writing about an album that’s been remixed is that you have to go back and listen to the original, especially if the mix of the original is hard on the ears.  Such is the case with Rush’s album Vapor Trails.  How did the original Vapor Trails get to be such a mess?  To make a long story short - in 1997, Neil Peart’s daughter died in a single-car accident.  Ten months later his common-law wife died of cancer.  At her funeral he told Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson to consider him “retired.”  He wasn’t in the mood to make music.  He locked up his house, got on his motorcycle and went wherever the mood took him.  This road trip lasted roughly three years [which he chronicled in his book Ghost Rider].  There was much doubt among the Rush fandom whether there would be another album after Test For Echo [1996].  I imagine Geddy Lee thought Rush was history, hence his My Favorite Headache album in 1998.


A couple more years passed and Peart decided he was ready to make music again.  Rush regrouped and made Vapor Trails.  After a five-year absence they were learning how to be a band again.  It took them about 15 months to make, the longest time they ever spent on making an album.  After spending so much time on making an album, the band lost their objectivity.  They didn’t have a fresh set of ears to tell them that what they produced sounded horrible.  There was plenty of aggression and energy in their playing [always a plus], but the results were lost in the production.  There’s much distortion.  For a band that prides itself on crystal-clear production [see their 1980s output], the original mix of Vapor Trails is complete shit.  Vapor Trails was a victim of the “loudness war.”  It was recorded too loud, it was mastered even louder.  The songs themselves sounded so much better on the live Rush In Rio set.

Fast forward seven years to 2009.  Atlantic Records released a Rush compilation, Retrospective 3 (1989-2008).  Contained therein were remixes of two songs from Vapor Trails – One Little Victory and Earthshine.  I liked what I heard.  So did a lot of Rush fans.  It was a good start.  The drums got fixed, and the guitars weren't quite so blurry.  Rumors abounded whether they would take the leap and remix the entire album.  The guys in the band see this as a blotch on their recorded legacy that wanted to fix.  To my surprise they did, and there was much rejoicing.

Guitars – For the first time since Caress of Steel, Vapor Trails didn’t have any keyboards or any synthesizers of any kind [many thumbs up!], so this left the instrumental heavy lifting to Alex Lifeson. There were lots of guitars on the original release, so many that they stepped on each other and created an unlistenable Wall of Sound.  Tool producer David Bottrill remixed the album.  When he did the remix, he didn’t use the original mix as a reference.  He went into it with fresh ears so he could pick and choose what parts to keep and what parts to lose.  He found some guitar parts that have gone unheard until now [like in Out of the Cradle and Ceiling Unlimited].  He pulled the guitars back from the forefront of the original mix.  You can hear acoustic guitars [like those on Earthshine] clearly.  You can hear separate guitar parts.  The sound isn’t a blur.

Bass - One problem I have with remixes is that sometimes the parts you liked the first time around go missing.  As far as Rush is concerned my fear was that the bottom end would find its way to the cutting room floor, and that Vapor Trails would sound spineless, like Roll the Bones and Presto.  The good news is that Geddy’s bass, though toned down a bit, is still heard and felt.  But this mix gives the bass a more trebly feel than what one would find on the subsequent Rush works Snakes & Arrows and Clockwork Angels.  Geddy plays lots of bass chords that got buried in the original mix.

Drums – On the original album, Neil Peart’s drums sounded like trash cans.  Now they sound like drums.  Not as good as Snakes & Arrows [not as much punch], but better than the original mix. [Yeah, I like Snakes & Arrows a lot...]

Vocals – You can hear them above the noise now where they were struggling to be heard before.  But on the minus side, the vocals are sometimes brought too far forward at the expense of the instrumental work.
If you thought the original Vapor Trails album was a turd because of the songs themselves, this remix won’t change your mind.  To you this is a newer, polished buffed-up turd.  But if you disliked the original album because of the distortion and the crappy mix, this remix is worth getting to give the songs a new listen.  At least when I listen to Vapor Trails now, my head doesn’t hurt.  But since Rush knowingly put out a crappy product in 2002, can I have my money back?

Tracks I like – One Little Victory [all guns blazing on this one], Ghost Rider, Vapor Trail, Earthshine [the best one on the album], Sweet Miracle, Nocturne