Another post captured from Facebook for posterity.

Envy of None is a fine album.

Is it a GREAT album? Hrm. I don’t know that I’d go that far, but I will say it’s a fine listen, and has a lot of merits, and I don’t regret getting it at all.

(Warning: digression incoming, and it lasts for a while. It’s relevant. It will end. We’re going to jump away from Envy of None; we’ll get back to it.)

Do you remember when Ready Player One and the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out? These were based on distinctive books, books that had specific characteristics that made its admirers love the books and prepare themselves emotionally for the pacing of the books, and looked for specific scenes and settings.

Spoiler alert, since the movies have been out for years: those scenes weren’t always there. The movies were inspired by the books, not faithful renditions of them, and that probably helped the movies (and I say this even though I think the books were better.)

For Rush fans, RP1 avoided one of the settings that I think I personally anticipated most: 2112! On screen! … as the protagonist in the book playacted the album’s first side to “solve a puzzle.” (The solving of the puzzle was “you must playact 2112,” if memory serves; the movie version of THAT would have been tensionless and dull.)

Envy of None has some of that same “oh goodness, Alex Lifeson, new music!” vibe to it. I get it. Alex is one of my favorite guitarists.

But what MAKES him such a great guitarist? Is it his fiery leads? … nah, he’s a great player, but he’s also jack of all trades; he’s not a Yngwie, a Satriani, a Van Halen, a Jeff Beck, or even a Gilmour. He’s more like a Clapton who spreads wider than the blues; he’s incredibly chameleon-like. He can do bits of what those other guys can do.

Is it his amazing rhythm chops? Welll… it’s the same story with his lead playing. He’s really good. But what you hear when Alex plays rhythm isn’t “my gosh, check out that rhythm guitar” because he’s good enough that it doesn’t take over, doesn’t cause us to notice what shouldn’t be noticed.

So what is it? It might be his tone selection - which is usually otherworldly, granted. Or even his note selection - Alex is notable as a guitarist in a lot of ways because if he weren’t playing the notes he chose, the song would be less for it.

I have no problem counting Alex Lifeson as a great guitarist, but it’s because he’s a complete and unassuming guitarist, not because he is a standout in roles traditionally considered important for being called a “great guitarist.” He can perform those roles, but his true skill is in contributing to the song.

So… in Rush, he had to fulfill a role, where he was working with an absolute beast of a rhythm section, and the whole band had to deal with the expectations that their own history had created.

It’d be like Hemingway, having written The Old Man and the Sea, deciding that his next story would be a child’s story of the discovery of a flower, written straightforward and without allegory or deeper meaning: Hemingway’s readers would have read such a thing and gone “… what?” and assigned some deeper meaning anyway.

Rush couldn’t have gotten away with playing straight 4/4, going “yeah, you’re fine, baby, let’s go dancing tonight” - well, not after Fly By Night was released, because Rush has that level of lyric - and if they tried, well, we’d all have nodded and gone “Yeah, they’re paying homage” or “they’re being sarcastic” or “they’re trolling us” and if they did it enough we’d think they’d have gone off the rails.

Our expectations drove Rush’ music forward. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s constraining. What if Hemingway had wanted to write a simple story without allegory? What if he were to have done so and then was frustrated that everyone saw all these shadows of art he did not intend?

So: back to Envy of None. I promised you I’d get back to it, and here I am.

Envy of None is Alex Lifeson indulging himself, to a large degree, to be whatever he wants to be. The burden of having been in Rush is very (very) heavy - look at all of us Rush fans going “IT’S NOT ENOUGH LIKE RUSH, I HATES IT” - but unlike Victor, he has a band and a drive to literally let the wind take him where it will.

He does play lead, but it’s not about Alex Lifeson, guitarist. It’s about a band that happens to have Alex Lifeson in it.

As a result, it’s quirky (a compliment!) and content (also a compliment) and pushes some buttons in odd places (again, a compliment) and patient (a fantastic compliment). It hangs together well, without acknowledging the burden that we might put on it.

The instrumentation is fairly placid; the guitars aren’t “forward” a lot (something Alex had been pushing to in Rush for years), and he lets vocalist Maiah Wynne take over lyric and vocal duties and the rhythm section plays competently but not “out” as Rush would have had to.

Wynne’s voice is very (very) clear, and she has a languid delivery reminiscent of David Gilmour: the emotional level is largely implied, not explicit. She sings about emotional topics and has responses, but her singing is… not flat, but very calm.

The vocals end up feeling disconnected, and I think that’s 100% intended, much like Pink Floyd used to choose in their production; if you wanted someone to shout at you, you chose Roger Waters, because he’s very shouty, and if you wanted someone to evoke dreamtime, you put Gilmour on the mic.

All in all, the album’s actually very good. It’s not trying to be Rush; it’s just trying to be what it is, and as a result it’s very effective, quite a good listen, and it’s a very deep listen, too: you can listen to it multiple times and get different things out of it over time, or you can listen to it at the surface and it has a lot of elements that make it a pleasant listen with little investment, too.

I’m glad I got it, and I hope they do more.