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 disliking a new release from one of your all-time favorite bands... is disliking it when seemingly everyone else is calling it a masterpiece. I honestly don’t get it. I’ve tried—really tried—to give this one a fair shot. Multiple listens. Different moods. Headphones. Car stereo. Nothing helps. I can’t stand it. And just for the record, I’m not in the “There is no Styx without Dennis DeYoung” camp. Do I wish he was still in the band? Sure. But 2003’s Cyclorama proved to me that they could still deliver without him.
The problem here isn’t DeYoung’s absence. It’s that this album doesn’t feel like an album. It feels like a project. A *concept*. And that’s rich, considering the current leadership spent a good portion of the 1980s trying to distance themselves from that sort of thing. But yes, what we’ve got here is a concept album. Something about a space mission gone wrong—off to Mars or some vague “better place”—and the ship gets lost out in the cosmic void. Riveting stuff. Because clearly, what we needed in 2021 was another “lost in space” rock opera. If you thought censorship and robots were a stretch, wait until you hear this one.
Structurally, the album is just plain baffling. Fourteen songs, 42 minutes total. That’s an average of three minutes per track. Some are even shorter. That might be fine if these were radio singles or punk rock anthems, but these are supposed to be dramatic, sweeping, progressive “pieces.” Instead, it feels like you’re constantly being yanked from one half-developed idea to the next. Take Trouble at the Big Show, for instance. This is James “JY” Young’s one and only lead vocal, and it clocks in at a puny 2 minutes and 30 seconds. I don’t even think JY gets more than a few lines in before the thing collapses under spacey sound effects and buried guitar lines that had potential... if you could actually hear them.
Then there’s Red Storm, which flirts with being something interesting. Gowan’s keyboard solo starts to cook, but just as you’re getting into it—fade out. Cut short. What follows is a pointless interlude of space ambiance, and then another instrumental (Khedive) that’s frankly just awful. None of these tracks are allowed to breathe. None are developed. It’s like listening to movie trailer music stitched together with static and static-laced narration.
If there’s one bright spot, it’s Radio Silence. It manages to exist *within* the concept while still functioning like an actual song. It has a structure, a melody, and a pulse. You almost wish they would’ve scrapped the high-concept storyline altogether and just filled the album with songs like this—songs that didn’t try so hard to be “epic” and just focused on being good.
And yet, online fan communities seem to be eating this up. Maybe I missed the boat. Maybe I don’t “get” it. But to me, this sounds less like a Styx album and more like a bad Kansas album from 1973. I honestly don’t understand why this version of the band seems so hellbent on mimicking their Wooden Nickel days. Newsflash: that wasn’t their peak. This album isn’t either
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