Heading into the holidays last weekend, Rush moved one step closer to wrapping up their long awaited ‘Clockwork Angels’ album with engineer Richard Chycki, tweeting this past Tuesday (Dec. 20) that initial tracking had been completed.

The members of Rush spent the past two months recording in Toronto at Revolution Sound with Chycki and producer Nick Raskulinecz. Geddy Lee has said that the first two songs from the album, ‘Caravan’ and ‘BU2B’ are a “great indication of where this album’s going,” but he also expressed that the album will have “much more variety.”

Preparing for their first album in five years, the band looked back to where they left off with 2007’s ‘Snakes and Arrows,’ and Lee says that while they were happy with the album, he felt like “we kind of overdid it with overdubs.”

This time around, they’re working to “simplify” the process to focus on making the guitar, bass and drum sounds “big, loud and clear.” Lee cautions that if they do employ overdubs, they want to be careful to make sure that it “definitely is adding and not subtracting” from the impact of the final product.

Guitarist Alex Lifeson said in an interview with Planet Rock that the band went into the sessions with five songs written, with plans to write five to six additional songs. While he says that things got off to a slow start, all of the necessary songs for the project had been written by the end of the first month of recording.

It appears that ‘Clockwork Angels’ will find the band stretching out, with most of the songs clocking in at six minutes, with three or four of those songs running over seven minutes.

Rush will head back into the studio in early 2012 to mix the project and according to Lifeson, they could be back on the road to promote the new album as soon as May or June.

 

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