Cinnabar - Naked Eye

Hear The Track Here

OK, here's the skinny direct from the Cinnabar Soundclick page ' for fans of: Genesis, Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, Queen, Esoterica. Now don't say you weren't warned. Mind you, the combination of Gary Judge, Matt Tyson and Mokee Dugway (collectively Cinnabar) definitely made me sit up and listen when I reviewed Visit With A Vision (April 2009), the first of their tracks I had heard, even if I heard each of the members individually before. It's a complex piece, a blend of classical and rock that actually works. If you imagine that melding these two sounds is easy, even with samples, think again. It's a very, very hard thing to pull off convincingly and Visit With a Vision did it perfectly.

One of the first songs, I am informed by Cinnabar, that is written using a 7/4 time signature which should automatically raise the red flag of prog rock warning. Hand on heart, as much as I try, I simply cannot abide prog rock in any degree but I do recognise it's validity as a genre - if not to me personally. For example, my very, very first exposure to this genre came way back with The Soft Machine and pre-fame Yes. There is no doubt in my mind that what Cinnabar have captured here is extremely close to the sound the original Yes were making back then. I don't think, though, that Naked Eye was made with that in mind, it's just an incidental byproduct.

Outside of jazz, how many other musicians dabble in weird and wonderful time signatures? Most of the population get lost unless there are exactly four to beats to every bar, and a nice lyric to mangle and distort. Obviously, Naked Eye is not for your average music fan then but if you like music to be (a bit) challenging, while retaining some melodic content then Naked Eye should do the trick. To be honest, there are huge parts of this track I do like and would like to see more of (those harmony vocals, some beautiful piano licks and the sheer weight of musical ideas) but even so it's prog rock leanings would still grate on me. Yeah, sad I know...

Highly Recommended prog rock tinged pop song.