Any record that has a first track entitled "Overture" (remember Rush's 2112?) can only belong to that endangered species, the concept album. And this is indeed what we find: IQ's Subterranea is spread rather too generously across two discs, over 100 minutes of music. Not even Marillion dared take their homage to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway this far. For the most part it works pretty well, assuming of course that your taste is for lengthy instrumental solos, metre-shifting rhythms and opaque lyrics like "At Traitor's Gate while you wait gender reassigned / Surgeon carves the matching halves / The blindfold leads the blind." Admittedly, IQ have got little that's original to add to a formula established in the early 1970s, but they do what they do with conviction. If time hasn't been kind to singer Peter Nicholl's voice, anyone with the audacity to make such a highly polished, high-concept album at a time when lo-fi is ´ la mode surely deserves encouragement. --Mark Walker