From what might be music's least promising premise ever – Canadian power trio record 20-minute concept piece loosely based on the crackpot libertarianism of Ayn Rand – Rush somehow conjured their masterpiece. Well, half a masterpiece – virtually all the fun here is in the title track. Where so many prog epics felt like the rock equivalent of a student ostentatiously waving their reading list, 2112 sounds like young man having the time of their lives, as if to see how many power chords could be crammed into 20 minutes, right up to the magnificently silly ending: "Attention all planets of the solar federation! We have assumed control!" Even the libertarianism is, more or less, just a reiteration of rock's central complaint: the man won't let us play our music! The uninitiated will marvel at Neil Peart's drumming – here was a man who could see a sausage roll and decide it needed a sausage triplet and a sausage paradiddle. If only it could have gone on for 40 minutes – the other five songs are less of a thrill, and the orientalist guitar hook of A Passage to Bangkok seems nearly as outdated as The Black and White Minstrel Show now.