Nap Eyes
The Neon Gate
PARADISE OF BACHELORS
Since their formation in 2011, Nap Eyes have proved that change is a constant. Each founding member of the contemplative indie-rock quartet has remained, yet the band’s approach to this craft has continually evolved. Recording techniques have ranged from the live rawness of their 2014 debut Whine of the Mystic to the glossy sound of 2020’s Snapshot of a Beginner, which was laid down at The National’s Long Pond Studio. Nap Eyes’ playful fifth album finds the perfect middle ground between these approaches as the band packs their mid-fi rock jams with fried guitar solos, electronic grooves, and a genuinely funky adaptation of W.B. Yeats.
With Nap Eyes’ members long uprooted from their origins in Halifax to multiple cities across Canada, the nine songs of The Neon Gate were captured at various times and locations—including a cardboard castle in the basement of bespectacled frontman (and former biochemist) Nigel Chapman’s family home. Early loop-based demos of the album’s songs were built upon by guitarist Brad Loughead, bassist Josh Salter, and drummer Seamus Dalton, making bouncy standouts like “Dark Mystery Enigma Bird” sound as fun and charismatic as early Jens Lekman.
Late-album cut “I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness” expands upon their buoyant electro-pop, as swelling synths and clattering beats propel Chapman’s impassioned reading of Yeats’ 1922 poem Meditations in Time of Civil War. This song’s fantastical images of magical unicorns bearing women on their backs seem like they could’ve emerged from Chapman’s imagination, much like the “complacent wizard” and wildcat playing N64 that he conjures elsewhere on the record. Giving Myriam Gendron a run for her money, “Demons” is his second successful attempt at setting poetry to music, turning a Russian Romantic epic by Alexander Pushkin into a strummy campfire sing-along.
On paper, The Neon Gate sounds like a patchwork of styles, with weightless songs like “Passageway” contrasted by the Sonny Sharrock–like shredding of “Tangent Dissolve.” Dating back to 2009 (and predating Nap Eyes), “Ice Grass Underpass” locks into a relatively standard verse-chorus-verse structure, but even this is delivered as a warbling fuzz-rock choogler that wouldn’t sound out of place within the Oh Sees’ live-album canon. Miraculously, these contrasting pieces—hip-hop hi-hats and folky guitars, verbose lyrics and ripping solos—come together as a cohesive whole. Their members might not change like The Fall’s did, but the cliché remains: Nap Eyes are always different, always the same.
