Between The Lines
“It has ended up being more like Subsurface , which had elements of political commentary, talking about propaganda and censorship.”
After much critical acclaim was heaped on their 2017 epic, Legends Of The Shires, prog metal exponents Threshold are back with their 12th studio album, the darkly brooding Dividing Lines. With tensions between bandmembers past and present now resolved, founding guitarist and producer Karl Groom sheds some light on the bleak themes it explores.
Arevolving door’s been in operation at Threshold HQ throughout the veteran prog metallers’ 34-year history, most notably in the lead vocals department. The last revolution in 2017 saw singer Damian Wilson leave for the third time and the return of other erstwhile vocalist Glynn Morgan for their 11th studio album, the epic Legends Of The Shires.
Five years later, studio album number 12, Dividing Lines, was handed to the record company in January, heavy CD and vinyl pressing schedules delaying its release. The hold-up frustrated Karl Groom, Threshold’s founder member and lead guitarist, who was hoping for a summer release. But, as he tells Prog, it’s only because he’s so happy with the finished result.
“I feel really confident about this album,” Groom enthuses. “I love the sound we’ve got on the vocals and how the music on it has come together.”
Billed as Legends Of The Shires’
darker, moodier brother, Dividing Lines
delivers 10 contrasting cautionary tales reflecting on a fractured world, its dissonance, discordance and strife. On it, Morgan re-establishes himself not just as an incisive vocalist and rhythm guitarist, but as composer of three of its hard-edged, immersive songs alongside Threshold’s regular writing team of Groom and keyboard player Richard West.
“On Legends…, we worked on the idea of a country trying to find its way in the world with a dual theme of a person finding their place,” Groom explains. “It wasn’t intended to be a direct commentary on Brexit, but it did tie in with that in certain places. We didn’t want to make it political in that way as that would be too divisive. However, it created a real buzz, and we toured a lot with it. That’s probably the reason why, to some extent, we delayed writing this new album.”
But the direction of creative travel was an issue early on. “At one point, we thought we were making Legends’… follow-up. There had been a real connection between us and the fans, something to which they really responded, and we thought it would be great to continue that,” recalls Groom.
“Then it began to feel a bit contrived, and we thought, ‘Hang on, we are kind of writing to order?’ I’ve always had a cut-off point with previous albums in that if I had songs I liked but didn’t put on the album, I would never use them again. This time, we thought, ‘Let’s just write the songs we want to write, assess where we are, see what fits and how those songs come together.’”
Groom saw a new theme developing as those songs evolved. “It has ended up being more like Subsurface, our seventh album released in 2004, which had elements of political commentary, talking about propaganda and censorship, which you can hear in the single Silenced that Richard wrote.”
Silenced has since been translated into a hard-hitting video of a young boy pursued by a robotic enemy through woodland, which perfectly
frames West’s lyrics, ‘The shouting of a dream/Was nothing but a scream inside/ As everyone was silenced.’
Groom explains, “People feel they’re not being heard and are being closed off from society. It’s very easy to find these themes due to the way things are going with populist governments all over the world. As Glynn was thinking along the same lines musically, it wasn’t too difficult to put it together.”
The album’s title comes from a line in Morgan’s climate catastrophe song, Let It Burn. “With this, Glynn was almost nodding back to our first album, Wounded Land, thinking about Mother Earth and mankind’s path of destruction,” Groom observes. “Let It Burn’s got more of a progressive element to it with a slower choral section at the end. He sent the demo through late on a Friday night when my wife and I usually sit down to really listen to music. This was the first song from Glynn, and she was interested in it too, especially when we thought it had finished, then that dramatic final ethereal section came in!”
The contributions from Morgan, originally the band’s vocalist between 1993 and 1996, impressed Groom a lot.
“I was really pleased with the way in which Glynn has matured, as I was judging him from what he did in 1995 and thought he would be writing something like on [second studio album] Psychedelicatessen or a more metal influence. But he’s developed so much as a lyricist and songwriter.”
Morgan’s wrathful King Of Nothing was chosen as the album’s second single. Again, Groom was delighted. “This wasn’t what I was expecting from Glynn. He has a style of writing which makes me smile every time I get a demo from him.”
Sequencing was perhaps the most challenging part of Dividing Line’s development to achieve a balance between the differing moods and styles of the songs. Haunted, the full-on Threshold-minted rocker that opens the album, wasn’t originally considered as the obvious curtain raiser.
“Richard and I were trying to structure the album but couldn’t find the continuity, then suddenly, we juggled everything and Haunted came up on top,” says Groom. “We really had to think about the dynamics as you can’t put all the long songs together. In fact, the whole album was a difficult one to arrange compared to Legends…, where we could slot in the songs around the storyline.
“In the beginning, we wanted to split up the songs written by Glynn, and the ones that Richard and I wrote because ours morph into one in some ways and they sound like Threshold. We were not so sure what would happen with Glynn’s, but we needn’t have worried