Come Sail Away - The Styx Anthology

Album Review

It seems that a double-disc collection of Styx would contain all their biggest hits, along with all of their key album tracks. Come Sail Away: The Styx Anthology comes close to fitting that description, but it falls short in a couple of noticeable ways. The compilers have made a conscious decision to emphasize the progressive hard rock side of the band, devoting most of the first disc of the 35-song collection to their '70s album-oriented rock radio staples. By the end of that disc, the hits start coming with "The Grand Illusion," "Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)," and "Come Sail Away," and these spill over to the first part of the second disc, which covers their prime period of Pieces of Eight, Cornerstone, and Paradise Theater, including all the big hits. Around this time, the song selection, which had been excellent until now, starts to slip, missing minor hits like "Why Me" and "Nothing Ever Goes as Planned," and that inconsistency plagues the final stretch of the compilation. The most egregious omission is "Don't Let It End," the excellent power ballad from Kilroy Was Here that reached number six on the Billboard pop charts, and its absence is all the more notable with the inclusion of material from their late-'90s/early-2000s comeback efforts, which may bring the anthology up to date, but simply isn't as good as their prime period. This is a major omission and it hurts Come Sail Away, but not fatally since, apart from the missing "Don't Let It End" and the other mentioned minor singles, this does its job right, and provides a thorough and accurate summary of Styx's long career.