IQ – Dominion (GEP) – Don’t ever turn your back and end up losing track. They’re a changed beast these days but they are still a fine one and they’re sounding glorious epic here on this latest rather big album. Got to love IQ, got to love Peter Nicholls as both a voice and a personality strong enough to handle fronting a band like this. Yes, sure, that wonderfully unique cutting edge blend of almost scratchy (beef in box) post punk and classic prog that they had back there in the early 80s is long long gone now, forty five or so years on from when they first set out with those wonderful DIY tape albums and all the wiggling and gardening over things down the Marquee, they’re a far (far) more refined thing now. An almost graceful thing yet they are still uniquely IQ, still a band to talk of in corridors and aisles, and here they are sending it out, it is all still there. This is still the band we loved back there, they still have all those emotional highs and that way of awaking things in that nervous manner; those trademarks and musical motifs that made them so special back there, this is still IQ.  And thankfully, they’ve not gone completely down the neo pothole on us, not down that one way street to boredom – oh that “neo prog” thing really is something awful, something that tarnishes so so (so) much, something very un-progressive and this is thankfully not not not that bloody thing called Neo Prog, this has far too much warmth, personality and emotion to be that damn blight of a thing. No, this is IQ really flying some six years on from their last album although it appears they’re still not quite sure how to land (with the sky reversed and whatever the lessons are we never learn).

Something like fifty minutes of music although it seems like hours already and we’re only three quarters of the way through the first twenty two minute piece of music (as say that as a good thing, as we may have said before, we like long songs). There is a lot here, and all with reason, it doesn’t feel overblown, it doesn’t feel unnecessary it feels centred in this world (or this perfect storm), it is all rather epic, alive with emotion, they may not have quite the personality and the cutting edge of those early days but then how could they? There’s a lot of water gone under those bridges and there is more than emotional warmth now, they still sound like they mean it all. Yes it is an emotional album and in more ways that one, there are lots of stories crammed into five here. Five tracks, five big pieces of music, that opener is kind of paced in the same way all the way through when maybe just a little bit more light and shade might have added to the dynamic – One Of Us does allow a breath or two afterwards though and you do think about those lost along the way after that long twenty two minutes of album opener The unknown Door – as fine as that opening shot is, One Of Us is rather welcome before things get a little more full bodied again with No Dominion.

And there is that sound of a musical box to open Far From Here and one of these days they’re going to cut you into tiny pieces or land somewhere while the bells keep ringing, do like the sound of a musical box, or did they intend bells? Right or left brain? You decide, Does the left get nothing right? Now it is in my mind to set this straight and what is there to say? What is there to garden over? To shake down? Are the cats still putting on leg warmers? A heart attack? More than that? They’re getting rather bombastic now, shame they’re lost in the ever decreasing circles of the rather insular way too conservative prog rock scene, this album deserves a little more than just that, there are some fine details in there. Recovering, awakening, that’s a classic IQ run that just went past and there is a better way, IQ always had a way of building their epics, master builders, and when he sings about how life will endlessly find a way you somehow still have faith in his words, in that last human gateway, that somehow a life has gone right and there before our eyes, IQ continue to shine, somewhere still out there, and it is emotional to be listening to them after all this time, after all the times shared with those who may not be here now, that mad man down the front on that live video and such, the lost members of the Marquee Choral Society and then you turn and go back through that Unknown door again and hold on for another ride and scrap what I said already about that opening track, there more than enough for a whole album in that opening track, they are sending it out, it is in your hands, it is epic, all revealed in unlit fields and there it goes, that prog rock chill down the spine that angel standing in the sun moment you only get with things like this, that revelation, that elevation as we get by with time for breathing, as before. How are they so damn hopeful after all this time and tide? Yep, IQ are still out there somewhere, somewhere still out there making great albums, slightly different now, they are still doing it, (not sure about that cover art), so much emotion in the order cascading, so much emotion in this very fine album.   (sw)

Bandcamp / www.iq-hq.co.uk

Previously on these pages, a few bits from the past –

ORGAN THING: A new IQ piece released today, a rather refined first taste of the long-stranding prog band’s new album…

ORGAN THING: Down that prog rock rabbit hole again with the new Star Period Star album, Airbridge main man Lorenzo Bedini’s solo album and a taste of things to come from Wobbler’s Lars Fredrik Frøislie, Bank Myna, Ekzilo and…

ORGAN THING: Twelfth Night’s Live Fact and Let Fiction Live, a re-imagining that really shouldn’t work yet really really does…

ORGAN THING: Down that prog rock rabbit hole again with Twelfth Night’s Art & Illusion revisited, last year’s Jordsjø album, something new from Pure Reason Revolution and…

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