DARK MATTER

"Dark Matter" (2004), IQ's ninth album, shows the band's brilliant form in their follow-up to the excellent "The Seventh House", in a work with a lot of gloom and darkness and in which they use as fuel many of the resources used by progressive legends.

Already from the synthesizers and Hammonds of Martin Orford and the sound base built by the bass of John Jowitt and the percussion of Paul Cook in the fatalistic "Sacred Sound", the seventies spirit is present and also manifests itself comfortably between the acoustic accords of Mike Holmes and the watery keyboards of Orford in the half-time of the melancholic "Red Dust Shadow" and the Gilmourian guitar playing that leads into its evolution, or in Jowitt's dense bass and Orford's eerie mellotron that the ticking clock announces in the hopeless and relentless "You Never Will", or in the similarities to the insidious keyboards of Pinkfloydian "Welcome to the Machine" in the intimidating and spacey "Born Brilliant".

But the definitive character of the album is marked by the enormous suite "Harvest of Souls". More than 24 minutes in which, guided by Peter Nicholls's assured vocals, IQ deploy all their instrumental arguments in sections that flow between the acoustic gentleness of the confessional "i. First of the Last", the political sarcasm of the super progressive "ii. The Wrong Host", the stormy, sloppy harmony of "iii. Nocturne", Orford's beautiful piano in the menacing "iv. Frame and Form", the generous Genesian keyboards in the stark materialism of "v. Mortal Procession", and Holmes' epic guitar playing dissolving with the band's melodic complicity in "vi. Ghosts of Days". One of the best pieces in IQ's discography.

"Dark Matter" is, in the particular style and more modernised forms of the Englishmen, a great homage to progressive rock.

4/4.5 stars