

I've always felt that great popular bands reach a crisis point in their careers where the style that made them famous is no longer popular, and they lose the plot for awhile. If the musicians can make it through those down years without breaking up or hating each other, they stand a chance of emerging as a better group. Most bands don't, of course — they lose patience and hang it up, or decide that they're not cool anymore and the world has moved on without them. Luckily for fans of Rush, their heroes never had much cool to lose; in fact, Neil Peart makes a powerful case on "Subdivisions" that "cool" is just a slightly more palatable and insidious kind of conformity.

Rush has spent more than a few years in the wilderness. But the Toronto trio never stopped experimenting, and what matters now is that Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neal Peart are making some of the best music they've ever made. On Saturday night at the Prudential Center in Newark, Rush put that music on display at a concert that ran nearly three hours. The band performed almost all of "Clockwork Angels," its nineteenth album, and one of its most ambitious and accomplished, and flanked those new songs with punched-up material from the band's synth-friendly '80s and '90s sets. (A sprint through "Tom Sawyer" and an abridged version of "2112" was the cherry on top.) This was not the Rush of the classic rock radio playlists. It was a very interesting, very gutsy version of the band: one with a response to the new wave and power-pop innovations that swamped so many of its peers, and a group with much to say to new audiences. At forty-plus years old and running, Rush is as loose, smart, skilled, and funny as it has ever been.

Rush rocks the Prudential Center 10/20/12 20 Gallery: Rush rocks the Prudential Center 10/20/12

The three appear to be having a blast, too. Rush can get away with burying the classic material because its fanbase is so rabid — true Rush maniacs (and the arena was loaded with them) know the repertoire backward and forward and will lustily cheer anything in the catalog. The band, to their credit, does not take advantage of this. The three musicians continue to push themselves. On the Clockwork Angels Tour, Rush was accompanied by an eight-piece string section, complete with a conductor. There was nothing staid or fussy about the Clockwork Angels strings: these men and women rocked out as hard as the band did, and that includes the cellists, who were bobbing up and down in their seats to "YYZ." The strings added color to the material from "Clockwork Angels," a concept set about a cosmic battle between law and chaos. (Peart, the lyricist and concept-master, is provisionally on the side of chaos.) Much as the crowd might have wanted more familiar stuff, the songs from "Clockwork" were played with so much conviction and courage that it was hard to ask the group to compromise its vision.

My review of this show will run in the Tuesday paper, and it'll discuss how Rush's embrace of humor has made the band an easier sell to the uncommitted. Once again, Geddy Lee's between-set films poked fun at the band's reputation for precision — Rush was presented as a steampunk/clockwork machine falling to pieces. Another series of films that alluded to the concept cast the members of the trio as mischievous gnomes — and for the second straight tour, Alex Lifeson ended up in a fatsuit. Lee played in front of a popcorn-maker and a giant brain suspended in solution. Periodically, mad scientists ran onstage to check on it. If this was more Alice Cooper than stodgy prog, all the better for a band that has once again caught its stride in middle age — and, if the enraptured cheering from the pair of kids next to me was any indication, it's reaching an entirely new generation of drum nuts, sci-fi fans, and suckers for big riffs.

RUSH

FIRST SET

Subdivisions

The Big Money

Force Ten

Grand Designs

Middletown Dreams

Territories

The Analog Kid

The Pass

Where's My Thing?

Far Cry

SECOND SET (with the Clockwork Angels Strings)

Caravan

Clockwork Angels

The Anarchist

Carnies

The Wreckers

Headlong Flight

Halo Effect

Wish Them Well

The Garden

Dreamline

Red Sector A

YYZ

The Spirit Of Radio

ENCORE SET

Tom Sawyer

2112 Parts I, II, and VII

Rush

Where and when: Monday at Barclays Center, 620 Atlantic Ave. at Flatbush, Brooklyn; 7:30 p.m.

How much: $50-$192; call (800) 745-3000 or visit ticketmaster.com

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