Re: Harvest of Souls. I had a tough time with it at first because I initially took part of it out of context.
Not just in the US, but in any nation at all, I find the whole "God is with our country" mentality to be extremely off putting and distasteful. But later realizing that much of the "The hand of God is on America" part was meant more ironically in the context of the song than I originally realized made it much more understandable and easier to relate to.
Remember that I only heard IQ for the first time when I picked up Frequency (gosh, I guess it was 8 years ago now, because I remember it was right after the Seahawks won the Super Bowl) and I didn't really do a "all in the deep end" dive until I picked up The Wake and Tales about 2-3 years ago. After that, I went on a tear and bought everything I could.
From that perspective, it's easy to miss that Dark Matter was the first post 9/11 album they had released and covers a wide range of emotions around not just those events, but the few years following it and how attitudes shifted once the "war on terror" got underway.