There are two schools of thought on the Canadian power trio Rush — for and against. Tonight, at the massive Montreal Forum, Rush are playing to yet another sold-out house and the lines are clearly drawn.

Taking the affirmative position are 14,000 French-Canadian fans, many of them wearing Rush T-shirts and scruffy denim jackets with the band's logo stitched across the back. They are vigorously pumping the sweaty, smoky air with their fists and yelling themselves hoarse as guitarist Alex Lifeson, drummer Neil Peart, and bassist-singer Geddy Lee roar through a two-hour set packed with tracks from nine of the group's ten Mercury albums — including their latest best seller, Moving Pictures. When Lee announces that the band is recording the show for an upcoming live album, the cheering and applause seem to shake the Forum to its foundation. And by the end of the lengthy encore, "La Villa Strangiato," the audience looks almost as exhausted as the musicians.

But one fan's meat is another man's poison. In the next morning's Montreal Gazette, reviewer John Griffin roasted the group mercilessly: singer Geddy Lee — whose banshee wail could pass the Memorex test — "sounds like a guinea pig with an amphetamine habit"; axeman Alex Lifeson, a master of high-volume licks, "is ordinary at best"; and Neil Peart's heady philosophical lyrics are summarily dismissed as "cosmic" Griffin signs off with one last slap, describing Rush as "one of the most tedious rock bands working the arena circuit today." The fans at that concert must have found it hard to believe this guy was at the same show.

Yeah, I saw that review," Geddy Lee sneers in disgust. In the thirteen years since he and high-school buddy Lifeson — whose blond, angelic features make him look like Botticelli's idea of a rock star — founded Rush, Lee has seen a lot more like it. Sitting in the back seat of Neil Peart's black Mercedes, which the drummer is racing across the Quebec-Ontario border on the way to that night's gig in Ottawa, Lee shrugs his shoulders. "I saw the headline Rush: Pomp-Rock Trio Hot on Tedium and threw it away," he continues in a near whisper, a marked contrast to his bloodcurdling singing. "I didn't have to read it to know what it said. Hey, the reviews we got in Toronto [their hometown] last week were the first favorable ones we'd ever gotten there." Bad reviews have been a way of life for Rush since Lee and Lifeson, both twenty-seven, and Peart, 28, first started touring America in 1974, hot on the heels of their Led Zep-alike debut, Rush. Now, despite the longstanding scorn of many critics, as well as radio station program directors who deemed the group's brand of progressive aggro-rock unfit for airplay, Rush are finally enjoying the fruits of seven years' labor on the road. Last year's Permanent Waves cracked the Top Five and even sired the band's first major hit single, "The Spirit of Radio."