DOMINION

Listening to IQ music is always a challenge to me.

"Dominion" opens with a long piece, 22 minutes, and well, this is not what I feared, the composition is well written, the voice of Peter Nicholls is emotional, good, and a bit sad as always. To get right to the point, IQ is always doing the same album, for 40 years.

The record is well done, everything is controlled, but to me, the aesthetic is too wrong. Their way to impose their chords-plaster, all along the album, is boring me up. To me, it's the worst Banks/Genesis use of chords, with Mellotron voice and so on, melted with some metal riffs. It's the opposite of progressive music. It doesn't show something new, or some subtlety to the compositions. They always go to these enormous chords-plaster. It's a nightmare to me, especially the keyboards. It's always a variation of Genesis' s special part of a song, a variation of "Apocalypse in 9/8" for example. "No dominion" embodies perhaps the most what I dislike in IQ music, the big chords-plaster.

But to be positive, they master their world. The mix is great, the sound is good, and the composition is well done. So if you like IQ, you will love this album.

But to me, it's not what I'm searching in progressive music. I search something delicate, that surprises me, adventurous and inventive, and this music doesn't bring me that. It's seems that with that kind of album, the progressive world is lost. But don't get me wrong, I think that this album is a good album, in it's own way. But I feel so desperate with that kind of album. So I'm looking around, searching "outside" of the prog world. Tigran Hamasyan for example.

So, fair enough, I wish a good listen to those who love this kind of music. There's nothing wrong. It remembers me of Marillion. In a same way, Marillion is always doing the same album, in a rhythmic perspective, and with the guitar. I love Marillion, but I feel that they are stuck in their way to compose music. And IQ is stuck too. But they improved their own language, so in that perspective, it's good.

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