Rush has displayed incredible consistency over the course of the last 40 years, but the band is not above reproach. When it comes to the three albums in the discography that can be legitimately called failures, each misfired for completely different reasons. 1975’s Caress Of Steel was a misguided attempt to expand the band’s broadening progressive rock direction, and 1991’s Roll The Bones was lost in a high-gloss rabbit hole of muddled, middling album oriented rock. Test For Echo, on the other hand, was much less excusable: a completely uninspired effort by a band that had been around enough to know better.

Even the mediocre Rush albums have a handful of great, memorable songs. Caress Of Steel has “Bastille Day,” Roll The Bones has “Dreamline,” “Bravado,” and “Ghost Of A Chance.” Test For Echo has nothing. It’s actually extraordinary how Lee, Lifeson, and Peart push all the buttons and seem like Rush, a comfortable air of familiarity permeating the entire record, yet it is so empty, totally devoid of hooks. Everyone just goes through the motions. As a music fan, that’s one of the most depressing things to hear; you try hard to make some sort of connection with the music, but it is so uninspired, so forgettable, that it all becomes a futile exercise.

“Test For Echo,” “Driven,” and “Half The World” try hard to continue the momentum that the very strong return to form Counterparts created three years earlier, but the melodies are hopelessly dour, lacking the vibrancy of the previous album. “Resist” is a desperate attempt to follow up successful ballads like “The Pass” and “Nobody’s Hero,” but it is awash in forced emotion and schmaltz. Peart’s thoughtful lyrics are wasted as each subsequent song fails to deliver, but even he goes too far on a pair of cringe-inducing late-album duds. Nothing dates songs worse than writing lyrics about technology, and “Virtuality,” which might have sounded contemporary nearly two decades ago, now feels as antiquated as a 28.8 dial-up modem (“Net boy, net girl/ Send your impulse ’round the world/ Put your message in a modem/ And throw it in the Cyber Sea”). Meanwhile “Dog Years,” which bears a strange resemblance to late-’80s Hüsker Dü — go figure — is as clunky a metaphor as Peart has ever used. “A year is really more like seven/ And all too soon a canine/ Will be chasing cars in doggie heaven.” Come on, Professor.

This being a Rush album, Test For Echo nevertheless peaked at number five in America, and the tour in support of the record was a successful one, which featured a performance of “2112” in its entirety. As mediocre as the album was, nobody could have expected Rush’s show in Ottawa on July 4, 1997 would be its last show for a very long time, as personal tragedy would put the band’s future in serious jeopardy.