10 Hard Rock Albums Everyone Forgets About
9. Caress of Steel - Rush
Most of the rock world needed a bit of time before eventually coming around on Rush. Though songs like Working Man and Fly By Night may have already been fine as decent classic rock songs, you can see why some of the more fairweather fans would be hesitant with songs that eclipsed the 10 minute mark like on later projects like A Farewell to Kings and Hemispheres. That was when they already had their cult following though, and Caress of Steel was when they started to grow up way too fast.
Going through this record in hindsight, even some of the band members thought the record was weird as hell, chalking it up to being pretty high when they actually wrote the thing. Just because it's bloated doesn't mean it's bad though, and a lot of the songs on here give us a look at what the next epic phase of the band's career is going to look like.
As much as some of the longer tracks like Fountain of Lamneth may get a little too self indulgent for some, there are also some amazing singles behind this project like Bastille Day, which should go down as one of the greatest singles that the band have ever released. The epic tracks may be a little meandering, but they still serve a purpose here as well. If anything, something like the Necromancer needed to be made if we were going to get a song like 2112 just a few years later.