Rain - Cerulean Blue (2004)

Being absolutely honest, I had some prejudice against this band due to the enormous amount of spam received in my PM account of Prog Archives and even personal mail, something to what I'm not used to, this kind of aggressive advertising produces the contrary effect than the desired by the person who floods my boxes, but it was for free in their website and the comments were pretty good, so decided to give them a chance and what I heard was really good.

To start the bio we must say that RAIN is not a band, we're talking about a multi-instrumentalist and filmmaker who plays almost every instrument in his debut album including: bass, keyboards, guitars, Jerusalem pipes, vocals, eye, with the efficient narration of Rob Brown and a group of competent musicians mostly in the chords and backing vocals.

There is not much more we can say about RAIN because his site provides absolutely no information about him and not easy to find in the net either.

Despite what Phil Collins (Well, not a good reference when talking about musical taste with a proghead), Tony Banks, Martin Offord or Tony Smith and many personalities have said about "Cerulean Blue" being the quintessential Progressive Rock experience of the 21st Century, I don't think so, the album is good but not outstanding, the sound is oriented towards Symphonic with clear Genesis references plus Pink Floyd influence with clear Neo Prog and Ambient/New Age echoes.

The choral arrangements are outstanding and the wonderful strings a la Vivaldi deserve a special mention, but the music is simple in Prog terms. Good for fans of soft Symphonic or Neo Prog.