TRAINWRECKORDS: "Kilroy Was Here" by Styx

I am super loving "Train Wreckords". PLZ MOAR

Matt Keeley

"- Hello everybody, and welcome to My Brother My Brother and Me, an advice show for the Modren Era. I'm your oldest brother, Justin McElroy. - I'm your middle-est brother, Travis McElroy. - I'm your sweet, baby brother, Griffin McElroy."

I really am enjoying this new series of yours, Todd. I've always preferred your more academic-looks back at the music of yesteryear. An excellent survey with hopefully more to come.

Styx is one of my dad's favorite bands and I, not really being a music person, have never thought to do any research into them, so finding out that they're not critically acclaimed is a genuine shock to me. Also, on an unrelated note, but my mom got to play Tommy Shaw's guitar at a Styx concert, which she will bring up at any given opportunity.

Noah Goucher

As a 25 year old who was raised on all of Styx records from an early age, I was not surprised by your distaste for Styx. I love them to pieces, but I found this review fair. Especially considering the fact that DeYoung's vision for the band was so bizarre.

Toryana Frazier

I love to see one of these on Combat Rock by the Clash, which I guess wasn't a flop itself, but similarly basically killed the band and led to one of the worst albums of all time and a huge flop.

Dennis DeYoung actually did return to the band from 1990-1999 and only had to leave due to health issues.

LifeIsStrange

The band Chicago occupied a similar spot to Styx, critics never quite turned around on them like they did for Lep Zeppelin or KISS, but they never really broke up and still tour today(though losing both Danny Seraphine and Peter Cetera definitely put a dent in the band's momentum). Chicago's Trainwreckords album would be "Twenty 1" as that was the band's first album to not go Gold since Chicago XIV in 1980-that album bombed in sales, was their first album to have no hit singles, it's poor performance along with poor attendance in the supporting tour led to Columbia Records dropping them from the label(though Colombia themselves did not help by poorly promoting the album), and it resulted in Chicago severely dialing back the jazz and woodwind elements of their sound(due to much of the music public seeing Chicago's image as being out of touch), so while it seems like XIV would make more sense to do on Trainwreckords, Chicago was able to bounce back from the failure of that album and the follow-up albums 15 and 16 in 1982 and 1984 were the best selling albums of the bands career. So while Twenty 1 did succeed in areas where XIV failed(it had two hit singles on the Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary charts and it did better better on the charts, peaking at #66 and staying on for 11 weeks, though it did not chart at all in the U.K.), it's a more fitting example for Trainwreckords because the band was never able to recover from that albums mediocre performance on the charts, that was in part due to the rise of Grunge music, and producer Ron Nevison argued that if the band had used his original mix(which can be heard on Youtube) instead of someone else being hired to change the mix without Ron's input. Another reason why Twenty 1 turned out the way it did was because the recording process was fractured as band members were rarely ever in the same room together and session musicians were being used while the band was touring. Also Twenty 1 leaned much more in the Adult Contemporary direction then any of the band's previous albums(the band no doubt saw Michael Bolton's huge success in the AC market and were hoping they could score big like he did), but the singles were flops compared to the ones on the previous album and even bringing horns back into the band's sound wasn't enough to get people to buy it. It's poor performance on the charts is likely what led to the band's next album "Chicago XXXII: Stone of Sisyphus"(which was more experimental in nature, with the band even trying it's hand at hip-hop at one point) being indefinitely delayed from it's planned release date(1994) by Warner Bros for over a decade until 2008.

LifeIsStrange

I think this album rocks

LifeIsStrange

Raise your hand if the first thing that comes to mind when hearing Mr. Roboto is the Volkswagen commercial with Buster Bluth. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D692JJPPUe4" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D692JJPPUe4</a>

Fred Mulholland

So, does this video (love the new series by the way) kick off the grueling wait for annual top tens or can we expect something more in December?

Robert Baczkowski

oh yeah now that i've watched it just wanna point out that the plot of the album is basically the same as the aerosmith arcade game <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_X" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_X</a>

i was actually just wondering if you were continuing this series, glad you did &amp; super glad it is this record, which i've always kinda wondered about

As someone who likes a lot of Styx, I can verify that this album sucks. Also, like in Disney movies, the villain song is the best.

Daniel Beckett

Can I sheepishly admit that Too Much Time on My Hands is one of my favorite 80's songs? And Mr. Roboto is a certified guilty pleasure of mine?

Brad Riegner

I'm very happy you did this. Kilroy Was Here holds a special place in my heart, as it was the first album I ever bought with my own money, of my own choice. Granted, I was 12, and for about the first 10 years of my life the only station played in the house was 70s easy listening, so I knew almost nothing about good music, but 12-year-old me thought Mr Roboto was the coolest song he'd ever heard, so he wanted that album. He also wanted to see the full movie he thought the album was the soundtrack for, based on the tl;dr liner notes you flashed up there. I mean they had all these stills from what looked like a cool sci fi movie on the cover and the sleeve! It wasn't until a few years later that I found out the "movie" was a short that played at the concert. My parents hadn't let me listen to the top 40 stations until I was almost a teen - I wouldn't get to go to a stadium rock concert until I was a junior in high school! And I didn't get to see that 10 minute video until YouTube was a thing, and I was able to properly appreciate how awful it was by that point. I'd already realized that the album's greatness was a product of some high-prescription nostalgia goggles when I picked up the CD in the 90s (the same thing happened with all those "great" Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning cartoons when they launched the Boomerang channel). Still, Kilroy Was Here was an important milestone in my musical education. Thanks for covering it.

Pooga

Arguably Rush ripped off Ayn Rand in the first place, but more broadly, a lot of concept albums have more or less the same plot: <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RockOperaPlot" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RockOperaPlot</a>

Joe G

What is it with luddite musicians who don't think 70s and 80s synthesizers are "computers" or "electronics" or even "technology" anyway? It's a trend I've noticed... Unless your synth is entirely analog, I'm not sure what the thought process is.

Pietro Gagliardi

Even as a Prog-rock fan, just, wow, no Styx... no.

Joseph Gosselin

Mr. Roboto....eh, it's no Automatic Man.

sweesbees

Well, now I know where 'Mr. Roboto' comes from. I genuinely had no idea what that meant until now.

Gordon Stearns

9:22 .....So they ripped of 2112?

Benjamin