het posted:

Man, I dunno how I missed this. Permanent Waves is probably my favorite from their catalog, but if you like the direction they moved in with Moving Pictures and Signals, you should definitely pick up Grace Under Pressure, Power Windows, and Hold Your Fire, all of which I would say are a lot better than Presto. Permanent Waves should probably be your first purchase though as I think it provides a good bridge from their 80s sound and their 70s sound (and it's also more consistent than a lot of their albums).

As far as similar bands go, Rush occupies sort of an unusual place in that they will often get categorized as prog rock but they really tend to stay pretty rooted in rock, and really don't push the boundaries quite as much as other prog bands like King Crimson, Yes, or Genesis; the prog rock designation comes more from the sort of wanky musicianship and tendency towards long songs (which they pretty much lost after Moving Pictures, and even then The Camera Eye is the only one that's all that long).

A lot of people have compared Coheed & Cambria to Rush, and while I think the music doesn't sound all that similar (aside from the high-pitched male vocals), I think they sort of play a similar role in that they're pseudo-prog, with epic concepts and an eye towards using somewhat elaborate rock music to tell larger stories, but again they don't venture far outside rock (in their case, being more pop-punk-influenced than having Rush's 70's blues rock influence).