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IQ new album 'Dominion' announced. |
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MikeEnRegalia 
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 Posted: March 27 2025 at 01:54 |
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Will listen to it when it is released
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richardh
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Joined: February 18 2004 Location: United Kingdom Status: Offline Points: 30252 |
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Posted: March 27 2025 at 01:40 |
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I couldn't agree less to be honest. Apart from Mike Holmes always great guitar soloing it's just about as unmemorable and pointless an IQ album ever released. I largely agree with the Notes Reviews and Nathan on Shuffle reviews on yt, both are big fans of the band but are basically being as poilte as they can be to not be too critical. 'Nothing sticks' after several listens according to them. I've heard it only once but at best it's about a 8/10 album and I'm not even sure about that at the moment (no goosebump moments and nothing remotely exciting). I don't like the mixing either , my CD copy has way too much high end and Cookie could lay off those crash symbals occasionally (please).
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essexboyinwales
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Posted: March 26 2025 at 11:23 |
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1st listen of Dominion (which arrived today) suggests it’s a huge return to form after the disappointing Resistance! Never Land in particular is gorgeous….
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Heaven is waiting but waiting is Hell
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Hrychu
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Posted: March 07 2025 at 12:54 |
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essexboyinwales
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Posted: March 07 2025 at 10:10 |
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I used to think that DM was their weakest album. Not by much! But it’s grown on me and I can’t really fault it. (and Resistance is a pale shadow of it). HOS is one of their finest epics (with TNM and TLHG) and Sacred Sound opens the album superbly. The middle 3 songs aren’t stunning but they’re solid enough. |
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Heaven is waiting but waiting is Hell
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richardh
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Posted: February 23 2025 at 22:45 |
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It was actually my comment and not that of Essexboy. We were chewing the cud so to speak. I think it's a 3 star album personally and of course that is my personal opinion. It stands or falls on Harvest Of Souls which even for IQ is incredibly close to the 'We want to be Genesis' template, so achingly so it's painful. The band was running out of ideas after the great run of Ever through to Seventh House and Martin Orford left not long after, partly disillusioned with the biz, partly because of the comparison they had invited to Genesis and the inevitable comments. At the end of the day there is only one band I like more than IQ so I am judging them by a different standard as I do with ELP. People like Dark Matter fine. If that can be an entry point for them then it's doing a job at least.
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Rexorcist
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Joined: February 18 2025 Location: USA Status: Offline Points: 344 |
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Posted: February 23 2025 at 11:42 |
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Well you gotta go with the trigger. In the context of raw favoritism, that's one of the most important things. It's pretty rare for me to consider an album 10/10 if it follows a singular genre. You'd have to make sure practically ever song is amazing for that to be the case. This has in fact happened before, however, notably with the albums Songs of Leonard Cohen, South of Heaven by Slayer and Almoraima by Paco de Lucia. It may also help if you have a strong theme which is lived up to in spades, such as The Disintegration Loops. Otherwise, a diverse and great album suggests that you're good at more than just one thing, which is why I prefer diversified albums and even started that neo-prog recs thread.
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moshkito
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Joined: January 04 2007 Location: Grok City Status: Offline Points: 18598 |
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Posted: February 23 2025 at 09:41 |
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Hi,
So far, what I have heard is nice. Not quite spectacularly great, but nice, and (perhaps) a bit pop'y for my tastes, or at least ... conventional. That's not to say that there are not nice things, but maybe I was expecting a bit more from a band that has been around for a long time. I'm not exactly one for the conventional sounding things at all, and much prefer a more experimental attitude, rather than a simple, play the lyrics kind of thing, which for me, is a bit tiresome, as I am a writer and words have special meanings, and many times, some of these lyrics are ... very trying! I live for my vision and the words are how those visuals can be described, and I can easily see when others do the same, but more often than mot the majority of the rock lyrics are in the area of let's pretend. And I'm not even a let's pretend person when telling the young ones bedtime stories, which have a special place in my heart.
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Music is not just for listening ... it is for LIVING ... you got to feel it to know what's it about! Not being told!
www.pedrosena.com |
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Hrychu
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Posted: February 23 2025 at 08:59 |
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The way IQ utilizes those tropes on Dark Matter triggers a very specific retro-prog area of my nerdy brain. 
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Rexorcist
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Posted: February 23 2025 at 05:35 |
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I actually just heard Dark Matter again recently, and I do admit that there's talent in the melodies and riffs, but it's also a bit familiar in the symphonic prog vein it's going for. I also listened to The Seventh House a while back and found it more wide ranging and surprising.
Edited by Rexorcist - February 23 2025 at 05:35 |
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Hrychu
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Posted: February 23 2025 at 04:27 |
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I personally love Dark Matter. It has some of the catchiest leifmotifs in the whole catalog, plus it's very nicely balanced with the technical playing imo. Harvest of Souls is my favorite IQ epic. It just has such a well constructed flow to it. No subsection sticks out tbh. Edited by Hrychu - February 23 2025 at 04:30 |
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Rexorcist
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Posted: February 22 2025 at 15:29 |
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Then I need to get to their whole catalog soon.
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richardh
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Posted: February 17 2025 at 22:14 |
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Great stuff indeed. Mike Holmes take a bow
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Jared
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Posted: February 13 2025 at 03:03 |
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Maybe DD are a bit of a stretch, but I always used to think of the Menel albums as being a slightly more 'prog' version of Ultravox...
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Music has always been a matter of energy to me. On some nights I believe that a car with the needle on empty can run 50 more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio. Hunter S Thompson
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essexboyinwales
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Posted: February 13 2025 at 02:54 |
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Common Ground, from Nomzamo, is one of my very favourite IQ tracks. Nomzamo was my first album of theirs and I played it to death. And I still love it! AYSC? was more commercial but still is a fantastic album. I’ve never made a connection between IQ and Duran Duran though😂 |
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Heaven is waiting but waiting is Hell
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Heart of the Matter
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Posted: February 12 2025 at 14:51 |
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richardh
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Posted: February 04 2025 at 22:00 |
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^ It may be the curse of the double album perhaps. The Road Of Bones was not originally envisaged as a double but became one after fans overwelmingly purchased the 2 disc version. Frequency was a much tighter affair and also featured one of the best English prog drummers Andy Edwards (now more famous for his yt channel it seems). However Neil Durants keyboard programming is exquisite on Resistance and creates a wonderful soundscape for the music. I feel it's a much more interesting album than TROB which pretty much repeats the track Further Away and shows virtually no musical progression in ideas. Prog is not always about 'the songs'.
IQ top 5 for me 1. Ever 2. The Wake 3. Frequency 4. Tales From The Lush Attic 5. The Seventh House Most overrated IQ album - Dark Matter. If ever an album showed a band running on fumes that was it IMO. Never rated it better than a 3 star album in PA terms. However for me the Paul Menel albums have to be at the bottom. He was never a good fit although I admire him as an artist in his right. His attempt at a prog epic with Human Nature was quite good fun actually and I love the song Nothing At All. Also No Love Lost was decent. Imagine Duran Duran had become a prog band and you have IQ in the Menel years.. |
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essexboyinwales
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Posted: February 04 2025 at 15:25 |
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For me Resistance was a huge step down from ALL their previous albums, including those with Paul Menel on lead vocals. If I score IQ albums out of 100, every album would score over 90 except Resistance, which would score more like 60-65. So many dull tracks on that album🤦🏼♂️ |
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Heaven is waiting but waiting is Hell
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richardh
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Posted: January 31 2025 at 00:00 |
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I got this from Andy Edwards yt channel. I did wonder at the time if it was just Andy's attempt at a 'joke'. Appears so!
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yam yam
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Posted: January 30 2025 at 10:28 |
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Martin wasn't completely out of the music scene for very long at all. He performed at Mellofest 2009 (the second international Mellotron festival, held on May 2nd that year at the Luminaire in Kilburn, North London), did some gigs with former IQ lead singer Paul Menel in 2012, and has been doing occasional acoustic gigs in front of small audiences (mostly house gigs) with Jadis's Gary Chandler since the summer of 2014. More info about that first gig he did with Gary here.
Here is a short clip of him performing at Mellofest 2009: And performing the IQ song 'Nomzamo' with Paul Menel at Leamington Spa, 5th May 2012: He then contributed to the Jadis album 'No Fear of Looking Down' in 2016 and their 'More Questions than Answers' album from the summer of last year. He still plays live gigs with the band to 'keep his hand' in, as he says. Regarding his decision to quit the music scene after he released 'The Old Road' in 2008, he said in an interview with Prog Magazine in the autumn of 2018 that all the companies that the album was shipped out to went bankrupt one after the other, and the album never paid its bills. He went on to say: "It takes four or five years to do this - every waking hour - and you never break even. The last track on 'The Old Road' is about the end of my time in music. All you can hear at the end of that album is the blackbirds singing in the garden, & that's all the songs you're going to get". Two more interviews with Martin can be found at: https://johnwettonlegacy.co.uk/f/meet-martin-widge-orford (November 2023) and https://dmme.net/interviews/orford (April 2003), though the first of those is about his experiences with John Wetton, and contains nothing of any relevance to IQ. When asked in that interview what he does for a living he replied: "I work for the Watercress Line steam railway one day a week and for the holiday park next door for the rest of the time. I basically look after the place, cutting hedges, mowing lawns and repairing and cleaning things. I also get to play with steam engines". Sounds like an idyllic life to me!
Edited by yam yam - January 30 2025 at 10:43 |
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It was actually my comment and not that of Essexboy.