But then Geddy starts singing, and although the production treatment on the verses lends his voice a faintly menacing metallic tinge, and his timbre long ago stopped resembling its caricatures, it's still unmistakably Geddy Lee, and twenty-six years of fond, vivid associations flood in: the shrill goofiness of By-Tor and the priests of Syrinx, the rococo black-hole overtures of Dionysus and Apollo, the trouble with the maples, the blacksmiths and the artists, the spirit of radio, my uncle's country place, living on the lighted stage, being cool or being cast out, time standing still, big science. Those may all have been Neil's words, but they became Geddy's stories. By the first chorus, around the minute mark, the guitars are fighting against sighing strings, and once the song spins out into its becalmed, pensive bridge it's clear that all my fears were premature. Geddy understands his place and history. This isn't quite a Rush album, but the differences, especially given Rush's experimentation with their own identity on Counterparts and Test for Echo, are fairly subtle. Geddy's lyrics don't attempt to invoke Ayn Rand, but then neither have Neil Peart's in a long time, and "Who's the fool / When apathy rules?" "It's a heart of darkness / That wants to play that game" and "There is no prayer / To the thieves of celestial history" all capture Rush's sense of literate insight. Soundgarden/Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron employs fewer drums than Peart, hit harder, but to an extent this merely demonstrates the influence of Peart's aggressive, maximalist approach to rock drumming returning, via Dave Grohl, Dave Abbruzzese, Lars Ulrich and even Tim Alexander, more or less full circle. Producer Ben Mink co-wrote the music and plays most of the things Geddy himself doesn't handle, but he obviously knows what Geddy represents, and so instead of trying to defy expectations or overthrow assumptions they set out to make a record on which Peart and Lifeson's absence is the absence of friends, not of repudiated principles, a record that tries neither to imitate nor elude Rush's precedents, and in doing so they come up with as confident, unforced and good-natured an album as maybe anybody is prepared to create. There wasn't much left for Rush to prove, and while I guess Geddy could have let having his own name on the cover reset the metrics, if he'd wanted to, the way Lifeson arguably did on Victor, he sensibly opts not to. And so My Favorite Headache is pop and progressive in whatever proportions emerge, whimsical and serious as appropriate, propulsive and delicate in alternation, intricate as a matter of taste. "The Present Tense" begins with some decisive guitar peals and cymbal crashes, but settles into a lilting vocal melody over a sinuous bass groove. Twinkling acoustic guitar and pinched electric solos wind around each other in the surging, solid "Window to the World". The opening of "Working at Perfekt" is vaguely AC/DC-ish, but the violin cascades in the middle are ready to challenge "Silent Lucidity". "Runaway Train" is as straightforward, in Geddy's idiom, as Soul Asylum's song by the same name was in theirs. "The Angels' Share" is basically a power ballad, a form Rush perfected with "Closer to the Heart" a long time before Night Ranger wrecked it with "Sister Christian". "Moving to Bohemia"'s gleeful mock-solemnity can't disguise a supple, chiming rock song. "Home on the Strange" plays with wah-wah guitar and splattering drums, but funkiness is hardly Geddy Lee's specialty, and I can't hear him sing lines like "He's an apolitical man" or "And he don't like change" without thinking that Tom Sawyer has grown up. The piano-lined "Slipping" is graceful and self-contained. "Still" strikes me as what happens to "Fake Plastic Trees" when you can't shake the faith that the trees are real. And the galloping "Grace to Grace", the understated finale, resolves nothing and shouldn't. There will, after all, be a dozen more albums that derive logically from this one. Rush will make them, or Geddy will make them by himself, or we will coalesce them out of air by sheer belief. I think Rush's music appeals to us, those of us who think it represents one possible ideal, in part because it seems so unconcerned with anything outside its own rules and system. Rush never tried to lead or follow anything, and if a tradition has accreted around them, I think of it less as a movement than a coincidence of purposes and aesthetics. However fashions vacillate, somebody always preserves the obdurate classicist notion that art and craftsmanship are by nature complementary, and we should be thankful for this, because otherwise we'd be ill-prepared to rebuild after this rebellion is done, and get ready for the next one. Punk has come and gone twice, at least, and Geddy Lee is still making records. It's tempting to take that as evidence of either punk's failure, or his obliviousness, but the obvious conflicts are rarely the productive ones. By-Tor owns a snowboard shop now, and Snow Dog naps in the corner by the heater, and it's not that they don't disagree any more, exactly, but they've come to understand what they share, too, well enough to see that polarizing each other never helped, and that their battles always aspired to dialectic and settled for spectacle, which is decorating the problem, not solving it. But that doesn't mean they don't still go down to the Styx every once in a while, when a winter evening feels just right, two old friends with no audience but themselves, and conjure up the old noise that binds them together.

Spock's Beard have one of the geekiest names in progressive rock, which is saying something, but they also, perhaps ironically, occupy an obscure sub-niche even within that obscure realm. I think of the set of shifts like this: as Metallica moved out of complicated metal into hard rock, Queensrÿche and Dream Theater filled part of the space left behind by pulling much of progressive rock towards progressive metal; the wing of speed metal that produced "Bring the Noise" and Slayer then mutated into Rage Against the Machine and Korn, leaving a melodic void into which progressive metal shifted by trading some progressive intensity for arena-rock's old pop instincts; the continuum from old progressive metal (à la Rage for Order and Images and Words) to Rush (who were never really metal) was thus abandoned by all the established players. Rush didn't make enough albums in the Nineties to be that closely involved, Marillion went their own way, and the once-crowded space was suddenly occupied only by a bunch of Magna Carta cult bands, SI refugees and whomever IQ took in at Giant Electric Pea. Spock's Beard are actually on Metal Blade, but they have much more in common with Magna Carta's Magellan and Shadow Gallery than they do with label-mates Fates Warning. If Magellan can be thought of as an expansion on Yes, in fact, it may be useful to think of Spock's Beard, at least as of Day for Night and V, as a similar extrapolation from Jethro Tull. Although their technical skills and arrangement ambitions seem to me to be on par with Dream Theater's, Neal Morse is a songwriter before he's a sonic architect, and the four short songs on V are all as easy to trace to pop antecedents as they are to metal or progressive ones. The quiet parts of the burbly "Revelation" cast back all the way to the Bee Gees, and even the loud, complicated parts sound more like the effusive pop of the Grays and Jason Falkner to me than they do like Empire. Much of "Thoughts (Part II)", with its multi-part harmonies, grumbling bass and fluttery organ flourishes, is virtually a Yes pastiche, but it's half 90125-era and half "Long Distance Runaround", a combination Yes themselves never exactly tried, and it's punctuated by acoustic-guitar interludes in which Morse's reedy singing suddenly sounds a lot like Michael Penn's. Take the keyboard runs out of "All on a Sunday" and you'd be unnervingly close to Extreme's "Hole-Hearted", and "Goodbye to Yesterday" is a disconcertingly plausible attempt to cross "Silent Lucidity", Peter Gabriel's "Red Rain" and Kansas' "Carry on Wayward Son".

The band retains their progressive credentials, however, by bookending these simpler songs with two unabashed epics. "At the End of the Day", the sixteen-and-a-half-minute opener, rises from a pretty quasi-classical figure to a boisterous charge that mixes elements from Yes, Rush and Dream Theater, sinks back into a strange Latin guitar-and-washboard jitter, slams through a short Deep Purple digression into jazz noodling and then horn fusillades, drifts for a while in a falsetto lullaby that edges from "Candle in the Wind" towards "Bohemian Rhapsody", and finally works its way back to a sputtering Yes/IQ finale. And "The Great Nothing", the album's six-part, twenty-seven-minute conclusion, encompasses just about everything from Cat Stevens campfire folk to Ben Folds and Jon Brion's notions of pop to ELP coliseum bombast, but if you can accept the idea that a single pop song can have a dozen sections and take nearly half an hour instead of having two or three in as many minutes, I think this has a good chance of qualifying. That is, I listen to it like I listen to a three-minute pop song, not as if I've embarked on a journey but as if I'm suspended in a moment, waiting for the next familiar hook to cycle past again. It's a long moment, admittedly, but it's shorter than a sitcom, and I feel, at the end of it, like I've participated in the sustenance of our culture, rather than the disassembly of it.