10 Greatest Final Albums In Rock

It’s a wonder why a band like Rush never did a concept record. Although you could call A Farewell to Kings or 2112 concept albums if you wanted to, those are all just made up of extremely long songs that just happen to have a strong narrative focus. As the band was winding down, they saved their very last record to go whole hog on an album length story.

Tying in with a graphic novel that Neil Peart was writing around the same time, Clockwork Angels follows a man trying to find his place in a steampunk like world. As much as this album should sound tired for the older stripe of prog rock bands, Rush haven’t shown an ounce of rust at all, with Caravan setting up shop pretty nicely going in and bringing the pain on songs like the title track and Headlong Flight, both of which feature some of the stronger Geddy Lee vocal performances of their later years.

There are even a handful of songs that go beyond what we normally expect from them, breaking out the acoustics on the song Halo Effect and closing the album with the Garden, which is probably the closest thing they have to a pure ballad in their catalog. Now that Neil is no longer with us, this is going to remain the final Rush album, but even in their final stretch, these icons were still pushing themselves to see what they could do in the studio.