Formed in Thessaloniki, Greece, but now based in the UK, Until Rain have made steady progress since their prodigious 2009 debut The Reign Of Dreams and now sound more than ready to elbow their way to the top of the prog metal pile.
Inure isn’t an album overburdened with radical ideas: instead it offers a more refined and elegantly subversive version of the fervently modern but fluid bombast that this sextet have been honing for the last decade. At times it feels like the band have spent a lot of time listening to Scandinavian, rather than British or American, prog bands. Despite regular bursts of quasi-extreme metal crunch, New World Fiction and Because Something Might Happen both echo the harmony-laden richness of The Flower Kings at their spiky but lavish best, while opener Progressus In Idem marries the heavier end of Dream Theater’s much-mimicked blueprint with the kind of quirky, atmospheric textures and rhythmic tricks beloved of Pain Of Salvation. The end result is only intermittently surprising – a textbook prog metal enterprise but there is something undeniably distinctive and charming about the way Until Rain blend their influences to bolster some consistently absorbing songwriting.
