IN SHELTERED WINDS

Niadem's Ghost was a Peter Nicholls-fronted project that had its brief flurry of activity back in the mid-1980s, during the period that Nicholls was out of IQ and Paul Menel was fronting that band. Between that connection and the fact that their sole album was rereleased on Giant Electric Pea (with the later Thirst EP tacked onto the end as bonus tracks), you might expect something that sounds a lot like IQ, and whilst Peter brings his distinctive vocal style and his bent for mysterious lyrics to bear here to lend a ton of atmosphere to the material, the musical underpinnings here is quite different.

The closest comparison I'd make, in fact, would be to the Chameleons, a group who'd defined a style of their own in the early 1980s that was a little dreamier than typical for post-punk, a little more nuanced than your average goth outfit, and with just the right amount of wistful melancholy in their sound to be truly compelling. (Their debut album, Script of the Bridge, had a title and cover art that'd suit a neo-prog outfit far better than an indie/post-punk/goth-adjacent group of the era, at that.)

That stylistic shift might be a surprise to some, but Nicholls' pre-IQ group The Same Curtain had in fact opened for the Chameleons at a gig in Manchester back in 1982 - that would have been right when the Chameleons were first generating a bit of buzz, and square in the middle of the band's heartland at that. Between that and a common tendency towards oblique lyrics, one can see how Nicholls would have found things in common with the Chameleons' vision.

Though this album is more prog-adjacent than pure neo-prog as a result, there's just enough intriguing touches added here and there to make it an atmospheric and compelling record; it's not quite as out there as the material Nicholls made in the 1980s with IQ, but it's not playing it safe to the same extent at the albums IQ made without Nicholls around this time. Some IQ purists might find that it ends up falling between two stools as a result, but I think it's ripe for reappraisal.