Music DVDs

Rush

Synth acts of the new millennium, behold Rush. By the time "Subdivisions" opens disc nine of the 10-DVD R40, commemorating the Canadian super trio's four decades of progressive hammer and thought, the nearly 20-hour Time Machine (also available on Blu-ray) rockets you straight back to the New Wave Eighties on a tune Depeche Mode to Chvrches could well crush today. If teen alienation has a sound, it's a synthesizer modulating between major and minor keys like raging hormones. Though 40 years largely compresses into complete performances from Rush's last five live campaigns, beginning with a raging 2002 Vapor Trails tour closer in Rio de Janeiro, the three-and-a-half-hour R40 bonus disc aptly minds the gaps by regressing back to 1974 for a cable-access-grade concert at a high school by screeching longhairs working their self-titled hard rock debut. An equally ancient (and black-and-white) source then bows drummer John Rutsey's replacement, rock mystic Neil Peart, in New jersey on the succeeding Fly by Night blitz. All seven segments of the 2112 suite, prog's trademark concept after Pink Floyd (take your pick), follows, as does the threesome's induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last year. Ultimately however, Rush's uncanny history pings and zings widely inclusive across set lists of the last decade and a half. "Subdivisions" LP rejoinder "The Analog Kid" surfs a dizzying solo from the ever-soulful Alex Lifeson on 2012's Clockwork Angels promotion – shot partly in Dallas and San Antonio – while both tunes' prescient Signals mate "Digital Man" appears on the preceding Snakes & Arrows tour, an electrifying show in Rotterdam 2007. Cleveland rawks between those two sets, brutishly Nietzian given its full run through of 1981 name-maker Moving Pictures. Nostalgic for 1977's A Farewell to Kings? See disc one for "Cygnus X-1/" and Frankfurt 2004 for Samuel Taylor Coleridge spin-off "Xanadu." Documentaries, motion picture-quality interstitials, tributes from South Park and Family Guy – no Rush fan will go without. Better still, R40's school notebook-type binder is reminiscent of the Freaks & Geeks yearbook configuration for the cult TV series. The not-so-missing-link: F&G Rush fanatic Jason Siegel in the intermission clip with Paul Rudd for the band's 2010/11 world domination. Launch R50 starting now.