The Neon Gate

After 3 years of silence, the Canadian band Nap Eyes have returned with their own meditations on the monstrous and familiar (or the monstrously familiar). The Neon Gate, their metamorphic 5th long-player, collects a cache of 9 fascinating reveries recorded over the 4 years since their last album, Snapshot of a Beginner (5 of which were released episodically throughout the spring and summer of 2024). “I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness,” the album’s colossal penultimate track, is, along with “Demons,” their languorous adaptation of a phantasmagorical poem by Russian Romantic Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), one of two ambitious but adept adaptations in which singer and principal songwriter Nigel Chapman unravels knotty, century-old verse into a fluid, memorable melodies across the loom of the band’s pulsing instrumental syncretism.
 
This fresh engagement with narrative and lyric formality complements the 7 original songs on the record, which reveal classic Naps touchstones but also evidence of divergent impulses toward nonlinear abstraction and longform improvisational composition (resulting in their most discursive, deconstructed, and deliquescent songs to date). With The Neon Gate, Nap Eyes have transmuted, as has their understanding of what a song is, what it can do, where it might go.
 
That all sounds deadly serious, but these songs are also as funny, quirky, and touching as ever, juxtaposing absurdist Middle Ages settings with concisely rendered quotidian details of journeys between earthly and cosmic planes (see the picaresque “Passageway” in particular). Castles and mystical critters abound, and faith in chemistry, astrophysics, and naturalistic observation tempers the spiraling doubt that can accompany deep cogitation. So the humble titular birds of opening track “Eight Tired Starlings” (Star Birds) must navigate light beams, curving spacetime, gravitational waves, and “billion-years-distant” galactic collisions. The pocket light beam, “complacent wizard,” and “breakfast plate” of eight-minute closing track “Isolation” (written, naturally, during COVID-19 pandemic lockdown) catalyze an uncomfortable revelation in the form of a one-liner: “how to get crushed under a gigantic / metaphysical rock.”
 
The recording methodology informed how the other band members Seamus Dalton, Josh Salter, and Brad Labelle, often supplementing or supplanting their customary respective roles on drums, bass, and guitar with synth work and drum programming kept pace with this dream logic. Nigel recorded demos many involving loops and the band built recursive fractal patterns upon those skeletal armatures, often remotely (sometimes with assistance from engineer René Wilson).

Released: October 2024
Cat: POB077LP   
Label: Paradise Of Bachelors

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Tracklist

1. Eight Tired Starlings 
2. Dark Mystery Enigma Bird 
3. Demons
4. Feline Wave Race 
5. Tangent Dissolve
6. Ice Grass Underpass 
7. Passageway 
8. I See Phantoms of Hatred ...
9. Isolation