The Unknown Door is a perfect lesson in how to construct a lengthy piece of symphonic prog music that never feels fragmented, cleverly balances light and shade, and is full of impressive musicianship without ever being flashy for the sake of it.
After a lengthy gap of six years, IQ have returned with a new studio album, Dominion. This is now their thirteenth in a career that is well into its fifth decade. The band emerged in the early 1980s along with a raft of other so-called neo-prog bands such as Marillion, Pallas and Twelfth Night. Most of those neo-prog bands have fallen by the wayside, and others changed their sound, but IQ is perhaps the one neo-prog band that over their career has kept faith with their style of creating big slabs of symphonic prog music. And not only that, but rather than clinging onto the successes from their youth, they seem to have improved with age, as shown by 2014’s The Road Of Bones being almost universally hailed as their best album. Will Dominion continue that trend? Let’s dive in and see.
Dominion consists of just five tracks, with four of them overshadowed in length at least by the twenty-two-minute opening magnum opus, The Unknown Door. Older prog fans will recognise that as the perfect length to fit on one side of vinyl and guitarist Mike Holmes has pointed out that it’s no coincidence: “Even in this age of streaming individual songs I still approach a new IQ release with a ‘side one’ and ‘side two’ thing in my head – the selection and placement of songs for ‘Dominion’ just feels like a classic album should”. Quite right.
The Unknown Door opens with a noble horn theme, and this classical sounding theme serves as an anchor to the piece in much the same way the Mahler-inspired string theme does in The Road Of Bones. There’s then a radio broadcast snippet of Chamberlain’s declaration of war on Germany in 1939, although the lyrics are obtuse and it’s not clear what the linkage to WWII might be (personally I had the suspicion that the song was about The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, but I’m probably way off the mark there!). Anyway, Peter Nicholls enters with his familiar voice (like Jon Anderson, his voice sounds as youthful and strong as ever), initially supported just by keys and then Spanish guitar. Towards the five-minute mark, a surge of power chords introduces the whole band, and the song powers forward with ever increasing urgency. The soundscape is rich, cinematic, and keyboard-dominated, as you would expect with this band, and the production is so crystal clear that every instrument is perfectly clear even in the densest of passages. Highlights as the track progresses are the return of the horn theme in more urgent guise around the nine-minute mark which triggers the most aggressive section of the song, the dramatic bursts of church organ and Moog (which also add different textures to the keyboard sound), and the inevitable but cathartic return of the opening melody at the end. The Unknown Door is a perfect lesson in how to construct a lengthy piece of symphonic prog music that never feels fragmented, cleverly balances light and shade, and is full of impressive musicianship without ever being flashy for the sake of it.
How do you follow that? Rather wisely IQ do so with a short acoustic song that could have come from the Paul Simon songbook. It’s a pleasant ditty and serves it purpose as a palate cleanser between more substantial dishes. Of those three further ‘dishes’, Far From Here at twelve minutes is the longest and follows a similar musical arc to The Unknown Door. The use of a musical box and the xylophone add a unique touch to the first part and the song builds up into a very Gabriel-era Genesis type of climax. Perhaps the most memorable part of the song though is the lovely melody that opens and closes the piece.
To these ears, the remaining two tracks are both the most brilliant and the most frustrating. The almost title track, No Dominion, opens with a tsunami wave of lush keyboards – it’s pure ‘80s neo-prog and totally bombastic. The vocal section is initially more restrained and leads up to the inevitable return of the lush keyboard theme. Just when you think it can’t get any better, Holmes enters with a quite inspired guitar solo. It’s going to rise to an epic climax, you assume, but it inexplicably just fades out. It’s as if Stairway to Heaven faded out half-way through Jimmy Page’s solo. I’m not sure what the band were thinking here but it’s such an anticlimactic finish.
The last track, Never Land, opens with atmospheric synths and surely one of the most inspired melodies IQ have ever written. Nicholls sings it beautifully, his pure tone reminding me of Jon Anderson in Soon, and the subject matter is moving too as Nicholls appears to sing about the impact of the death of a loved one. At the four-minute mark the song, the mood changes as the music becomes more rhythmic and develops in a much more forceful direction. While that fine melody is still at the heart of it, to these ears the magic of the track has been lost. If instead IQ had maintained the reflective mood, perhaps adding a restrained solo (yes, just like Soon) then I think it would have been the perfect tearjerker to close the album.
Those frustrations I have about both No Dominion and Never Land are really minor quibbles that in my mind only prevent excellent songs from being deemed classic ones. There’s no doubt that Dominion is a high-quality symphonic prog album – the best one I’ve heard so far this year. Time will tell where it stands in the IQ catalogue, but I suspect it will be somewhere up near the top.
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