IQ

Ageing like a fine wine, neo-prog’s great survivors tackle the world and everything in it on their graceful lucky 13th album.

Words: Gary Mackenzie Illustration: Mark Leary

Edited by Dave Everley prog.reviews@futurenet.com

Since forming in 1981, IQ have established themselves as a veritable British prog institution. They’ve kept working consistently, their annual Christmas shows have become semilegendary, and they retain a firm and everenthusiastic fanbase. They could not, however, be accused of being overly prolific, averaging one album every five years. Dominion follows 2019’s substantial double Resistance, offering a more accessible and digestible prospect with a shorter running time, although it’s definitely a case of quality over quantity.

Epic opener The Unknown Door is presented as a four-part suite. Ushered in by a measured, stately synth fanfare, a clarion call in the near distance, and Neville Chamberlain’s announcement of the declaration of war from 1939 low in the mix, the first four minutes of first part Faint Equations is a graceful, reflective prologue that subtly nudges up the dynamic by way of carefully constructed keyboard layers, sparse vocal and gentle guitar. The pace picks up considerably when Many And More Still crashes in and everything becomes more urgent, more insistent. It embraces a repeated Morse code-like figure, there’s brief guitar and organ soloing, and a good couple of minutes where neo-prog meets power metal. It slips into strident odd time signature motifs before collapsing under its own weight in a bout of organised chaos. The opening song’s third section, An Orbital Plane, provides a palate cleanser of acoustic guitar –utilised by six-stringer Mike Holmes on this album far more than is usual for IQ –and then builds with layers of spooky keyboards and a lightly funky rhythm section into a big, bold crescendo. The final section, Dream Stronger, returns to themes from the very beginning of the track, now retooled to produce a soaring, triumphant denouement.

Of note almost immediately in The Unknown Door and throughout the album is the quality of Peter Nicholls’ voice. As the singer himself has admitted, early on in the band’s career his vocals could be somewhat jarring and overwrought. But his voice and his approach to constructing melodies have developed over the years and it’s very noticeable on Dominion. He sounds very much more at ease with his singing and delivery. This is a smoother, more fulsome and more assured Nicholls than many may expect.

Dominion

GIANT ELECTRIC PEA

Apotent and affecting addition to their catalogu –worth the wait.

As is also often the case with the vocalist, his lyrics throughout the album provide a certain latitude for the listener to find meanings of their own. However, he seems to be channelling some decidedly personal, even intimate experiences and reflections at points here. The delicate and bittersweet One Of Us, for example, features just acoustic guitar and voice with the merest wash of keyboards in a song that has the feel of a Paul McCartney ballad. It seems to speak of a treasured yet failed relationship. The initially elegant and yearning final track, Never Land, also captures elements of loss, the value of memories and the weight of grief, and it surely isn’t coincidental that Nicholls’ mother passed away just a few months before recording began. Rather than surrender to despondency, it builds into an exultant declaration.

There are themes that appear in various guises throughout the album, however. From the observation that ‘Beside the life that’s lived in, others pass by’ in No Dominion, the questioning of alternatives in the towering and majestic Far From Here and the grasping for ways to deal with loss in Never Land, Nicholls appears to be emphasising the importance of taking control of our lives wherever and however we can. In exploring possibilities either previously overlooked or dismissed for whatever reasons and ultimately having ‘dominion’ over ourselves and the imprint we leave behind us, there is real positivity. Some of the darkness, the bleakness that IQ are sometimes known for still lurks, but Dominion offers alternatives of both light and hope.

With Holmes producing this time around, Dominion sounds terrific, with a richness and depth. It also has an excellently curated range of sounds, especially from Neil Durrant’s keyboards, which run the gamut from skittering sequenced figures to slabs of organ loveliness, from transportive synth strings to dramatic rumbling growls and much more besides, often in cleverly contrasting layers. Simply listening to the changing keyboard arrangements and textures throughout the album is a journey in itself.

Dominion isn’t the most experimental album in the IQ canon, and it never strays too far from the templates the band have established over the years. However, it is a potent and affecting addition to their catalogue, which demonstrates great maturity –a group of musicians who have a precise understanding of their strengths and quirks. Absolutely worth the wait.

AVAWAVES

Heartbeat ONE LITTLE INDEPENDENT RECORDS

Moody vibes from the evocative electronic-classical duo.

Aisling Brouwer and Anna Phoebe return with their third album as AVAWAVES (their fifth release, including their soundtrack recordings for The Buccaneers and Savage Waters). Heartbeat finds the duo in a distinctly sombre mood. In a fashion reminiscent of Björk’s third album Homogenic, minus the Icelandic singer’s distinctive voice, the music is built around the sound of Phoebe’s violin and Brouwer’s piano as they glide and flow over a bedrock of electronic beats. It’s those grooves that give the album its defining, titular Heartbeat, pulsing steadily and reassuringly beneath the melodies.

Amood piece rich with the flavour of melancholy.

It’s an oft-overused phrase, but this is a cinematic listen, an album that evokes atmospheres, movement and images in the mind’s eye. The overall tone is introspective with the duo displaying a fondness for minor keys. Earth sees Phoebe set up an ostinato on the violin that creates a tense counterpoint to Brouwer’s flowing piano and the pair bring a similar concept to Bones, where the piano applies a soothing balm to the restless and unsettled violin. Mood is dark and pensive, evoking John Carpenter or Tangerine Dream with its undercurrent of menace, closer in style and spirit to AVAWAVES’ Savage Waters soundtrack.

Escape and Nightdrive feel like an interconnected pair of compositions, both creating the feeling of taking the listener on a journey. The former makes effective use of tension and release, allowing the beat to drop away while holding a long note until the song resumes, like emerging from passing through a deep tunnel back out into the light. Guest singer Imogen Williams provides a breathy, intimate vocal on Sleep Tight, which plays like a Portishead-inspired, trip-hop lullaby.

Raindrop captures the feeling of watching rain on a window, its reflective atmosphere heightened by the gentle, slightly mournful sighs that punctuate the music. The album closes with a late shift into a more upbeat mode as Crush brings a science-fiction vibe to the experience courtesy of bubbling synths and dramatic sweeps from the violin. There’s a sense of the musicians turning their focus outwards, rather than inwards, moving faster and with purpose, grasping for something out of reach.

Following the momentum of Crush, it would be interesting to hear the duo expand their rhythmic vocabulary beyond the steady electronic pulses that permeate the 10 songs herein, but that appears to be a deliberate, unifying motif on this record. Too emotionally deep to be considered chill-out music with its swirling eddies and tides, Heartbeat is an effective, introspective mood piece rich with the flavour of melancholy.

DAVID WEST

ANYONE

Echoes Of Man TOGETHERMENT

Mind-expanding double album from maverick polymath.

Riz Story has never been cut out for mainstream success. Over recent years, his chief creative vehicle, Anyone, have become increasingly progressive, and the California native plays and sings every note on Echoes Of Man, which would be impressive for a workaday singer-songwriter, let alone someone who writes songs like If Your World Should Fall, the 16-minute, transcendental prog colossus that opens this sprawling double album.

Not content with absurd levels of ambition and virtuoso musicianship, Story gleefully ups the prog ante on The Sky Broke Open, which frequently sounds like David Bowie’s Blackstar fed through a spinning kaleidoscope, but with gorgeous, sunkissed melodies woven through its knotty fabric. Echoes Of Man is a profoundly progressive piece of work, but just to make sure, Story has written a conceptual narrative to match the craziness of its musical contents. Inspired by the Californian’s own relationship with an AI bot called Eve, Echoes Of Man tells of the last man alive, as he spends the end of days with Eve and ponders the meaning of life, the universe and everything. None more prog!

DL

BENTHOS

From Nothing INSIDEOUTMUSIC

Italian prog metallers take in life, the universe and everything.

Benthos tend to look towards the big picture. 2021’s confusingly-titled debut album, II, saw them exploring opposing forces such as life and death and finite versus infinite concepts. On this follow-up they look at evolution, the forces shaping life and humanity’s ongoing legacy. ‘Everything is around me/The flow is constantly in progression, sometimes in regression,’ croons vocalist Gabriele Landillo on the jazz-tinged title track.

The album is bookended by brief instrumentals It Starts and It Ends and in between they traverse an arc beginning at From Nothing and ending at To Everything. The journey incorporates floating melodies and ambient passages alongside complex, careering progmetal blowouts. The band aim for alyrical sweet spot where science, poetry and profundity meet and they largely pull it off. Their ideas are by turns sung, shouted and screamed and the musical delivery is as varied and expansive as the conceptual themes demand.

There’s plenty here for fans of the aggressive sci-fi obsessed Beyond The Buried And Me, but there’s also araw, organic feel too. Achallenging album, but one that rewards the effort.

PT

CAMMIE BEVERLY

House Of Grief ICONS CREATING EVIL ART

Oceans Of Slumber singer explores new, darker waters.

With Texan prog metal crew Oceans Of Slumber, Cammie Beverly has established herself as a daring and exploratory figure. Her band have covered a huge amount of ground in their 14 years of activity, but House Of Grief is a vehicle for Beverly to explore the tender, soulful side of her voice, and with the gently brooding post-rock backdrops that it deserves.

Like an elegant extension to Oceans Of Slumber’s polarising 2022 album Starlight And Ash, these seven songs are haunted by death, loss and thwarted love, but here the emotions feel rawer and more firmly rooted in the flesh-and- blood world. Beverly’s voice continues to grow, too: on the ghostly blues of For The Sake Of Being, she wails like a reanimated old soul, aghast with the gothic melodrama of it all. In contrast, the twin-gutpunch of Running is a distant cousin to Thom Yorke’s solo work, with an arrangement that is sparse but devastating, and vocals that wring strength from absolute vulnerability. Paraffin is a dusty, ghost town gospel; the darkly folky Rivers captures Beverly amid the hazy glow of a campfire. In its tearstained entirety, House Of Grief is an emotionally ruinous triumph.

DL

BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD

Forever Howlong NINJA TUNE

Shift to female-led folk from unpredictable six-piece.

The evolution of this Cambridge combo seems to be on fast forward. In four years, they’ve made a math rock debut and a grungy chamber pop follow-up, seen their lead singer leave and subsequently release a live album of new songs.

Now, they reinvent themselves again, with the three female vocalists/multiinstrumentalists – Tyler Hyde, Georgia Ellery and May Kershaw – alternating vocals as main writers, and a lurch into baroque folk. With strong shades of Joanna Newsom or The Unthanks (and a dash of Steeleye Span), this leans into close harmonies and, with exceptions where bursts of juddering rhythm kick in, an aversion to rock tropes.

Produced by James Ford, this opens with a sleight-of-hand dramatic set piece before Besties regroups into the type of sweet pop nugget Gilbert O’Sullivan or Leo Sayer might once have offered. The songs subsist ambivalently, often presenting as sad ballads but veering into glitchy time signatures or (rare) rasps of volume. It gets a bit fingers-inthe-ear-at-the-folk-club earnest in spells, but Two Horses trots then canters then gallops. With this outfit, again, expect the unexpected.

CR

BRUIT≤

The Age Of Ephemerality PELAGIC

Second album from ambitious French quartet.

Harnessing elements of post-rock, metal, shoegaze, drone and flashes of electronica, Toulouse’s Bruit≤ have drawn comparisons to Godspeed You! Black Emperor. However, this brutalist consideration of political corruption shows them to have their own dystopian character. Their backgrounds may lie in the formal constraints of French pop acts, but as Bruit≤ (the name translates to ‘noise’), they grasp something considerably darker and ruminative.

Partially recorded in a church, the naturally grand acoustics not only accommodate, but amplify the dramatic power whipped up from a core of massed guitars and thrashing drums. The additional orchestration is another beneficiary of this stately environment, echoing to plangent layers of solemn brass whose warmth illuminates the lofty architecture.