Big Bang Theory (2005)
1.I Am the Walrus
2.I Can See For Miles
3.Can't Find My Way Home
4.It Don't Make Sense (You Can't Make Peace)
5.I Don't Need No Doctor
6.One Way Out
7.A Salty Dog
8.Summer in the City
9.Manic Depression
10.Talkin' About the Good Times
11.Locomotive Breath
12.Find the Cost of Freedom
13.Wishing Well
14.Blue Collar Man @2120
Never has there been a band so eager to erase its own history quite like the 21st-century version of Styx. Since Dennis DeYoung was essentially pushed out the door, classic-era members Tommy Shaw and James “JY” Young have worked tirelessly to reshape the band's image into something that barely resembles its heyday incarnation. After a string of tedious and redundant live albums, the band did manage to strike gold with the all-original Cyclorama in 2003. So naturally, instead of capitalizing on that creative momentum with more new material, they chose instead to hop aboard the increasingly crowded “influences” bandwagon and churn out a covers album. Because, of course, that’s what fans were really asking for.
Let’s start with the good news. The songs sound quite good. Credit where it’s due — the band pulls off a number of these covers flawlessly. Some of them might even improve on the originals. Tommy Shaw, for instance, puts on a respectable Roger Daltrey impression for I Can See for Miles, and drummer Todd Sucherman quite frankly runs circles around the legendary Keith Moon. Meanwhile, Lawrence Gowan does his best John Lennon on a surprisingly well-done take of I Am the Walrus, which they even manage to pull off live. That track alone might be worth the price of admission, if you're a Beatles completist or a fan of late-era psychedelia done with polish.
The problem here — and it's a big one — is that for an album like this to work, the band has to have a recognizable identity to begin with. Styx doesn't really have that anymore. Not in this configuration, anyway. There's nothing here that even remotely echoes the band that gave us The Grand Illusion, Pieces of Eight, Equinox, or even Paradise Theatre. So instead of hearing Styx reinterpret their musical influences, you're hearing a very competent but faceless bar band jam its way through a Boomer’s record collection. And that’s not exactly the kind of legacy this band used to represent.
Which raises the question — who exactly was this record made for? The diehard fans from the early ‘80s probably won’t know half of these songs. And the people who were listening to The Lovin’ Spoonful and The Allman Brothers on the radio back in the ‘60s? Most of them never cared for Styx to begin with. It’s hard to imagine the crossover appeal. Yes, Tommy Shaw still sounds like Tommy Shaw. Yes, JY is still very much JY (and still very much not a vocalist). In that sense, maybe Gowan comes off the strongest here simply because his voice hasn’t been stapled into the Styx legacy long enough to draw direct comparisons. His work on I Don’t Need No Doctor and A Salty Dog is legitimately great — and in the case of the latter, might even rival DeYoung’s golden tenor.
Note: I was almost ready to give this album three stars. And then I saw it. Yet another version of Blue Collar Man. This time, it’s a slow, acoustic, bluesy reinvention — because of course it is. Enough should be enough.
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