IQ
Scrape Across the Sky

Scraping across the winter skies comes IQ who releases their first blu-ray in January and it was recorded in December so it is indeed wintery skies they are scraping across. Cool artwork, reminds me of their latest studio album Road of Bones that was well received by some reviewer here at Hallowed. And all the tracks from that album are present on this live release so it is marvellous from the tracks selection point of view. But on the subject of view, they didn’t allow me to view the album just hear the songs. Strange thing considering that this is a blu-ray release and it isn’t being released on CD or anything like that.

I have seen eight minutes from the film, while the present the band and play a song, it looks okay but I will focus this review solely on the sound as that is the only thing I can really review and not the guys in red hats and angel wings. And the music is the patented complex melodic rock music that IQ tend to offer, it is called progressive rock by some but you can’t really call something that have been done for 200 years progressive. We get mostly stuff from the latest album but there is stuff from other albums as well giving us a nicely varied album that plays for a decent period of time.

The sound is excellent and the band’s performances are excellent, you have to be some kind of idiotic Santa to dislike how this release sound – and as Santas don’t read Hallowed I don’t think anyone of you dislike how this sound. And I think you could get this album just on the basis of the music being great and it wouldn’t really matter if the visual impression is not very good. But from what I have seen it seems as though the visuals are fairly good as well, but it is hard to judge from just one track, especially when it is a track where they present the band.

In the end I can conclude that I have found out what I could get for my birthday, it would be a good present as I would have been happy with that. As live albums go, it is not easy to find better stuff than this one and the rating could have been higher had I only seen the visual content. Anyway, for all you high IQ persons out there, this is a release for you you would have to be a foamy elf not to like it.

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