Warthur Mr. Roboto might have been the hit single, but the rest of this concept album resembles the style that Styx used on Paradise Theatre with a somewhat bigger synthpop influence. They don't go full synthpop, mind - just like they didn't really go full prog on The Grand Illusion - which makes Roboto a bit uncharacteristic of the rest of the album, which is a shame because it's an undeniably catchy song. (Though it's rather unfortunate that the droids on the album cover or in the music video look like racist caricatures.)

The really big shift here is that whilst Paradise Theatre's concept was fairly restrained and sober - a state-of-the-nation look at America at the end of the 1970s through the allegorical lens of the rise and fall of a legendary concert venue - Kilroy's story is absolutely goofy. "Rock opera about a dystopia where music is banned" is very, very well-worn territory by this point; Rush got the idea out of their system on one side of 2112, Zappa stretched the concept to 3 LPs in the Joe's Garage series (but wasn't really focusing on the story that much, if at all), Dream Theater would base The Astonishing around it and that Queen jukebox musical uses the concept too.

Styx may well have been beating Queen and Dream Theater to the punch here, but Rush and Zappa had told this story before and done it better, and had done it not that long before Styx did it. Sure, the subject matter probably felt more immediate to Styx due to Christian groups objecting to Snowblind from Paradise Theatre, but even so it feels like they don't really have much to say about this concept which hadn't been said better by others, and DeYoung's quasi-Messianic posing as Kilroy is unquestionably cheesy.

If you like Styx's brand of cheesiness, that's not necessarily a problem, especially if the idea of a substantially more synth-focused take on Paradise Theatre appeals to you. If you fell in love with the sound of The Grand Illusion or Pieces of Eight, I can see why this album might bug you. I like it, but equally it clearly marks the point where the band's sound has strayed so far from their prog-adjacent hard rock roots that it's no surprise that they needed to spend the rest of the 1980s taking a break from being Styx after this.

Warthur Doing a concept album just as you are dialling back the prog aspects of your work and presenting a more straight-ahead AOR style might be counterintuitive, but on Paradise Theatre the tactic pays off for Styx.

Hilariously. Christian groups and censorious politicians got upset about Snowblind - the former outright accusing it of being Satanic - despite the fact that it's not remotely as heavy as, say, Sabbath's song of the same name. There's at most a mild increase in the proportion of hard rock in the band's sound here compared to Cornerstone - but Cornerstone was a low water mark in that respect, and much of the album tends towards the softer end of AOR.

If you were charmed by The Grand Illusion because of the prog touches that Styx incorporated here and there in their sound and found their more straightforward material and ballads uninspiring, you likely won't dig this, but for those who find the latter aspects of their sound endearing this is a bit of a treat.

Warthur As the 1970s faded away and the 1980s hove into view, the rise of punk and metal meant that hard rock sort of fell between two stools - too hard for people who wanted something softer, but no longer hard enough to satisfy audiences who had heard more aggressive and challenging sounds now flooding the airwaves.

Whilst Styx's Pieces of Eight was a defiant bit of hard rock with prog and pop touches which bucked the commercial trends of the era, Styx found their AOR blend dialling back on the hardness, turning into a form of pop rock with occasional prog influences and a good deal of synthesiser texture from Dennis DeYoung. The synths here certainly date the album a bit - too modern in their sounds to quite fit the mellotrons-and-Moogs era of the early to mid 1970s, but sufficiently dated that they still sound a little cheesy, but then again Styx's guileless, unironic embrace of mild cheesiness is perhaps part of their charm. Cornerstone might see them abandoning the balance of influences that made The Grand Illusion and Pieces of Eight so strong, but I can't say I dislike it.

Warthur On The Grand Illusion, Styx did a fine job of walking the tightrope between poppy AOR and prog-tinged hard rock, and on Pieces of Eight they try to do much the same. As with its predecessor, it's a carefully judged balanced: there's just enough hard rock touches to make it feel credible in that arena without compromising the radio-friendliness, and just enough little flourishes to give a hint of prog whilst still prioritising pop hooks over prog complexity. (That said, going terse can bring its own benefits: on I'm OK the band cram a bunch of little movements into under six minutes, yielding a song which gives the feeling of a multi-part prog epic without demanding the runtime of one.)

This sort of alchemy makes them exactly the sort of band the term AOR was coined to describe - because they're not prog rock or hard rock or pop rock or soft rock to be unambiguously described by any of those terms, but are enough like all of those things that they're clearly some flavour of rock aimed at a somewhat more mature audience than more singles-oriented genres.

At the same time, "AOR" tends to be associated with very commercially-oriented material, but that's a little unfair here. Sing For the Day isn't the sort of song you do expecting it to be a hit, and likewise if you were just trying to churn out viable radio material the 1-minute instrumental The Message is a weird thing to spend time on; in 1978 if you were wanting to chase the big money you'd be making disco or new wave. (Styx would eventually do exactly that, but they don't do it here.)

In fact, you could argue that despite being as radio-friendly as it is, Pieces of Eight is commercial despite itself - it isn't necessarily being anti-commercial, but it is being anti-bandwagon. It's carrying the torch for progressively-tinged hard rock in an era when many bands working that style were shifting away from it - Lords of the Ring puts me in mind of the more grandiose efforts of early Queen, for instance, who this same year were putting out material like Fat Bottomed Girls. On the whole, the album doesn't capture the same lightning in a bottle as The Grand Illusion, but it comes very close.

Warthur What is the Grand Illusion? In the hands of Styx, it might be the boundary between full-blown progressive rock and radio-friendly AOR pop. The album finds Styx straddling that divide in a similar manner to the way Kansas would attempt from time to time - though whilst to my ears Kansas always got the best results when they stopped trying to balance the equation and just embraced their prog side, here I think Styx actually manage to master both the substance of AOR-pop and the texture and aesthetic of prog simultaneously.

With The Grand Finale recapitulating the theme of album opener The Grand Illusion, for instance, there's a certain sense of an overarching concept here, but as with Supertramp's Crime of the Century (another classic of the borderland between prog and pop) that may be more apparent than actual; either way, you get some really solid, hook-laden tunes here which manage to be smart enough to pique the curiosity of a prog audience whilst being straight-ahead enough not to abandon their pop roots. I think it's badly underappreciated.