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One of the reasons Nap Eyes are such an interesting band is that they never really fit. The Canadian quartet came into being a little after bands like The Shins, Fleet Foxes, and Real Estate, and didn’t quite slot into the same psychological or musical space, despite appealing to a similar cohort of fans. Where that benefits them, at this exact moment in time anyway, is that they still seem to be on the first go-round, creatively speaking. Where, for example, the new Real Estate album – as good as it is – has a distinctly settled sound to it, Nap Eyes’ music retains a restlessness, a sense of quest and purpose. Ten years and five albums into their career, they are not quite elder statesmen. They have not reached the point at which they sound too much like themselves, which is a roundabout way of saying that they are still making music that sounds fresh, and that each new Nap Eyes record still feels like an event.
The Neon Gate feels bigger and wilder than its predecessor, 2020’s Snapshot of a Beginner, but it nonetheless carries itself with an easy charm. Nap Eyes songs drink deep at the wells of philosophy and literature, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from a cursory listen. They wear their profundity with lightness, even when the song’s very name conjures up weight. Such is the case on I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness: despite the mouthful of a title, it glides along on irresistible indie-folk guitars and a chirpy rhythm section. But get a little closer, and you realise that it’s a setting of the final part of W.B Yeats’ epic poem Meditations in Time of Civil War. Yeats’ poetry was deliberately weighty, often apocalyptically so, and Meditations is one of his most troubled pieces, fully aware of its own ‘demonic images’, its language of twisted millenarianism. Yeats felt that it was the job of modernism to confront these doomy themes. Primary songwriter Nigel Chapman, on the other hand, has lived through postmodernism, has seen, perhaps, its late flourishes and its death throes. This might provide clues for his band’s apparent serenity in the face of difficult times.
Other clues include songs like Feline Wave Race. Chapman has a preoccupation with the twentieth century’s experimental modes of creativity, and here he uses improvisational writing and spontaneous composition – a similar technique to that used by surrealists, dadaists and the Fluxus group – to create a gentle, loping folk-pop melody and a lyric that devours time and space, encompassing everything from thirteenth-century castles to 1990s video games—a postmodern effect from a modernist cause. Deep time and wide space are recurring themes: opening track, Eight Tired Starlings, is like a sci-folk epic, skirting realms both massive and personal and doing so against a gentle backdrop of acoustic guitar. Chapman’s voice circles the terrain of Dylan, Reed and Richman but never quite sounding exactly like anyone.
The band’s music often seems to point to a difficult relationship with the future. The skittering, shuffling drums of Dark Mystery Enigma Bird seem to exist on the cusp of human creativity and machine programming. They use technology as a picture frame to show off the human endeavour at the heart of the song but are wise enough to know that sometimes things are more interesting when the frame starts encroaching on the picture. Brad Labelle’s thrilling, dissonant lead guitar on Tangent Dissolve sounds like it was created on the basis of a mathematical system most of us are unable to grasp. Labelle’s guitar also lights up the shambling indie-rock of Ice Grass Underpass, an old song written before the band even existed that has the feel of mid-period Wilco about it. Passageway sounds like Calexico without the horns, a kind of psychedelic space-western like the soundtrack to a children’s fantasy film directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Best of all is Isolation, the languid closing track which functions as a kind of metaphysical journey through the early days of Covid lockdown and Demons, another poem set to music. This time, it’s Pushkin who gets the treatment against a sweet, surprising cascade of keys. Like many of The Neon Gate’s songs, it tells the story of a strange journey in wholly human terms. The surprises that appear at every turn offset the studied slacker vibes of Chapman’s singing, and the whole thing ends up twisting memory and contorting space and time in the most satisfying ways. Nap Eyes seem to create a different niche for themselves with every new album; long may it continue.
The Neon Gate (18th October 2024) Paradise of Bachelors
Order The Neon Gate: https://lnk.to/24naps
