That glorious, gripping gothic sound…it’s the bass, so rich and fat and somehow darker and stronger in tone than other bass on other rock albums. That sound dominates the album for its entire span.

But how can I claim that the bass dominates, when the drumming is so assertive, every musical phrase rent and roughened by the astonishing, Elvin–esque force? That fellow on the throne puts the “power” in this power trio.

And though the rhythm section are without doubt the perfect pair that sets this ensemble’s sound apart from any other rock I know—so hard! So much harder than the music more famously going under that label—the guitar remains a shaping force, legato wails that are anything but the blues, somehow otherworldly rather than earthy, these wails alternating with blazing arpeggios that eschew chordal structures in favor of an architecture more liquid, more mercurial.

Lyrical images and album design chime with one another—black and red everywhere, dreaming and nightmaring in streams of black and red images, heavy like the chill of a starless night, lithe like a sportscar burying its needle in flight. Black and red visions, beautifully bonded with the impossible twinning of gothic–effervescence captured in music.

For a third of a century this artwork was so singular in my listening consciousness that I genuinely could not conceive of another like it, by any group anywhere at any time. I know every Rush album note for note, and that knowledge helped solidify my sense, for 33 years, that among their work and thus certainly among everyone else’s, Moving Pictures was a unique jewel.

Yet now I know that every single word I write above in my failed effort to capture the experience of listening to Moving Pictures also describes, as well as I can, the experience of listening to Red, Moving Pictures’ magnificent doppelgänger, its anachronistic (in my journey) big brother from seven lucky years before.

I’ve no idea if anyone from Rush listened to Red during those seven years; it seems likely, but it’s irrelevant. Logical relationships fade into dust when confronted with the exhilarating might of this mimesis in my Red Dream.

My deepest thanks to Karl—without him, I would not yet know there are two.