New boy (!) Lawrence Gowan leads “Reveries” and once again, the band’s playing, singing and full range of skills are all on display as the music segues to “Hold Back The Darkness”. Credit must go to both the band and “seventh man”, producer Will Evankovich, who himself contributes guitars, keyboards, percussion and vocals. The musical inventiveness within this track that lasts for less then three and half minutes is mindblowing. Tommy Shaw’s vocals lead “A Monster”, a track where just when you think you know where it’s going, takes a left turn into a mid section powered by acoustic guitars and mandolins! Todd Sucherman gets a quick drum solo before a dive-bombing JY guitar solo takes us home. “The Fight Of Our Lives” kicks things off with a proggy intro of less than 30 seconds, before the magnificent signature vocals of the band kick in, declaring “We will not give in!”… and they’re off! Four part and five part harmonies are something this band takes in its stride and they standout throughout this album. However, the key to great lyric writing is producing words with universal applicability – on that basis, I think many will find this to be an album that speaks to the times but won’t sound like a historic piece when revisited in the future.įor me, one of the strengths of The Mission was the band demonstrating that musical inventiveness and creativity doesn’t need to mean epic length tracks (the longest track here is 4:00 mins long). No, it’s not the Co-Vid album because, as the band have said, most of the writing and some of the recording was completed before lockdown. Well, I’ll cut to the chase: with Crash of the Crown, the band has captured the essence of their greatest musical moments and crafted a classic album that transcends these times. The Mission was easily the best album the band had produced since the 80s, so let’s see how the follow up measures up… Perhaps that makes it surprising that such a short time later, we have Crash of the Crown, another new studio album about to be released. 1984’s live album, Caught in the Act was the marker for the start of fluctuations in the life of Styx, with the 30+ years between then and 2017’s The Mission producing only 3 studio albums of original material. It’s a challenge that faces many bands in the genre: you have a significant, iconic back catalogue, audiences who will happily pay to attend your shows having accepted significant line up changes but… what about studio albums? This is a dilemma that Kansas, Yes and many others have faced over the last 20 years as the dynamic of the music business has morphed on account of technology and audience demands.
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