Nap Eyes : The Neon Gate
“Eight Tired Starlings,” the opening track from Nap Eyes’ The Neon Gate, is a six-and-half-minute discursive, meandering, muddled mess of half-baked ideas, constantly collapsing melodies and no discernable verse/chorus structure. In the context of the Nova Scotia band’s latest effort, it is the sonic equivalent of those kitschy, faux-blood dripping signs lining lawns and front steps every October. “Beware, ye who enter here.” Frontman Nigel Chapman and company have always been purveyors of the kind of psychedelic folk that leans ever-so-slightly into self-parody. “Eight Tired Starlings” is a song about “distant planetary systems unfurled,” the “propelling wind of the self-development paradigm” and “the third wave of the gravity.” That is, everything and nothing, all at the same time. For better or worse, The Neon Gate very much delivers on the promise made with “Eight Tired Starlings,” never once shying away from the grand, the absurd or the spectacular.
I keep having this idea—I’m pretty sure it’s a bad one, but I keep having it anyway. Writing about music can feel, as the old maxim goes, like dancing about architecture—that is, somewhat insufficient, lacking and futile. The idea stems from a desire to write about an album in a way that captures not only content and context but a blend of the two, what it feels like to listen to a record. It’s self-indulgent, painfully meta and wholly impractical, but I find it’s usually my favorite albums that spark this idea. I’m not sure if Nap Eyes’ latest, The Neon Gate, necessarily reaches that level, but something about it excites that idea more than any I have heard in quite a while. The stoned collage, inscrutable subject matter, and fractured song structures of Nap Eyes latest are what make it both confounding and endlessly fascinating. Parsing central throughlines to an album like this is like trying to land on a unifying theory to a season of Planet Earth. A single song will find Chapman exploring the vast emptiness of outer space, twisting mountain ranges, and millions of beetle species with very little apparent connective tissue. Elsewhere, on “Demons,” Chapman adapts a poem by 19th century Russian poet Alexander Pushkin that somehow feels perfectly in step with his own cosmic musings.
Nap Eyes have been explicit, but this is something else entirely. It’s fair, at times, to question whether even Chapman himself knows what exactly he is trying to get at. There is a distinct improvisational feel to much of The Neon Gate, both instrumentally and lyrically, that may frustrate some listeners, but viewed generously, Chapman’s lack of pretension can be rewarding in itself. These are songs meant to wash over you, rather than cut through. Including the opener, there are no less than five songs that stretch over the 6-minute mark, each adopting and shedding ideas with little preciousness. The result is an album that never feels as labored over as some of the more expressly psychedelic records we often get from the genre that feels full of more regurgitated ideas than anything else. This approach doesn’t always work (“I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness” is, go figure, almost unfathomably wordy) but, more often than not, I find myself willing to follow Chapman and company through whatever celestial wormhole and into whichever interplanetary force field they may lead.
Label: Paradise of Bachelors
Year: 2024
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