The Styx CD Review

The Mission (2017)


  1. Overture
  2. Gone Gone Gone
  3. Hundred Million Miles From Home
  4. Trouble at the Big Show
  5. Locomotive
  6. Radio Silence
  7. The Greater Good
  8. Time May Bend
  9. Ten Thousand Ways
  10.Red Storm
  11.All Systems Stable
  12.Khedive
  13.The Outpost
  14.Mission to Mars

The only thing worse than hating a new release by one of your favorite bands, is hating the release when everyone else seems to really like (even love) it. I don't get it. I've tried to give this thing several listens, and I just despise it. I should point out that I am not in the "There is No Styx Without Dennis DeYoung" camp. True, I wish he were back in, but Styx proved to me they could make a very good album without him (see 2003's Cyclorama).

First, this album doesn't really seem like a set of songs, yet rather a story. Or a concept. A concept? Isn't that what the new leaders of this band hated in the early eighties? Not to mention the concept is pretty stupid and unoriginal. From what I can tell, it's about a space mission to "better place" (Mars, I think) and yet the spaceship gets lost somewhere in the great beyond. How original. You thought robots mixed with censorship was stupid.

Looking at the structure of the "songs", we have 14 songs clocking in at 42 minutes. So the average song is only 3 minutes. Since this is the "average" length, many songs are shorter. It's a major handicap. Take the song Trouble at the Big Show for example. This is guitarist James (JY) Young's only lead vocal on here and the whole song clocks in at a mere 2 minutes and 30 seconds. As I recall, JY doesn't even sing through much of the song either. This is extremely disappointing since every Styx album since 1975, could count on having 1 or 2 rockers from the tall heavy guy in the band. Speaking of "heavy", you can hear some great guitar riffs within this song, but they're buried in the mix behind some ridiculous "outer space" sound effects.

Another song, Red Storm, has potential (it is longer than 3 minutes), yet the song fades out during a pretty-decent Gowan keyboard solo. Fading in over this is some boring acoustic piano. Why? Then the next song is 18 seconds of ridiculous sound effects and serves no purpose whatsover. Following that interlude, we get another keyboard driven song Khedive that's awful as well. So most of the songs here just never get a chance to breathe.

Sadly, there's only one good song top to bottom, and that's Radio Silence. Yes, it's under layers of the "lost in space" concept, but it holds out rather nicely. One wishes the band would have simply released an album with good-ole-fashion songs like this instead of what we here.

As I mentioned, though, many in the online community like this album. I think it sounds like a bad Kansas album from 1973. I really don't understand why this lineup of Styx is trying to replicate their Wooden Nickel days.

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