Rush-Clockwork Angels (2012)

Five years would pass before the Canadian band Rush released their next album, which would ultimately become their discographic epitaph. On "Clockwork Angels", the trio returned to their heavy hard rock style, but blended it with a series of highly complex and progressive pieces. With brilliant musicianship, Lifeson, Lee, and Peart created another concept album about a traveler and his various encounters, involving law enforcement, chaos, the world of piracy, and other surreal scenarios. The album opens with the heavy hard rock track "Caravan", a highly accomplished instrumental piece, followed by the thunderous "BU2B", another energetic song with heavy riffs, galloping bass lines, and virtuosic, dynamic drumming. However, it's with the track "Clockwork Angels" that the trio begins to expand into progressive and complex sounds, an inspired piece that continues with the elaborate "The Garden", the haunting "Headlong Flight", the exotic "The Anarchist", and the catchy "Wish Them Well". For many, this was Rush's finest conclusion, an album closer to the musical philosophy of the distant and spectacular "Moving Pictures" (1981) than to almost all of their subsequent releases in the eighties and nineties.