Nap Eyes - Monarch, Berlin

MusikBlog & ByteFM präsentieren: Nap Eyes im Monarch
VVK startet Freitag 12. Januar um 11.00

Nap Eyes are pleased to announce the release of their new album, I’m Bad Now, on March 9th via Jagjaguwar. The acclaimed Canadians’ ambitious, allusive third album achieves a new sonic clarity, depth, and range to match the effortless melodies and extraordinary writing. It’s the band’s most transparent and personal set of songs to date, in which singer Nigel Chapman interrogates social, psychological, and spiritual milieus for clues about the elusive nature of knowledge.

Album opener “Every Time the Feeling,” arrives with a subdominant chord and a subdominant attitude, only switching to the first person in the (repeated) final verse, for this devastating admission:
Oh I can’t tell what’s worse:
The meaninglessness or the negative meaning
But I figured out a way
To get on with my life and to keep on dreaming

I’m Bad Now constitutes the third chapter of an implicit, informal trilogy that includes Whine of the Mystic (2015) and Thought Rock Fish Scale (2016). The brilliantly reductive title is something we’ve heard children announce verbatim when roleplaying the perennial game of heroes and villains, “good guys” and “bad guys.” “I’m bad now,” they declare, but an equivocal binary is implied: it’s only a matter of time or trading places before they have the capacity for
good again. Perhaps goodness will manifest in the multiverse, on a different circuit than this faulty, frayed one. Is that faith or fantasy? And what is the difference? The title is also, of course, a sly Michael Jackson appropriation.

While Nigel composes Nap Eyes songs in their inchoate form at home in Halifax, Brad Loughead (lead guitar), Josh Salter (bass), and Seamus Dalton (drums), who live a twelve-hour drive away in Montreal, augment and arrange them, transubstantiating his skeletal, ruminative wafers into discourses that aim to transcend what Nigel self-laceratingly deems “bored and lazy disappointment art.” The band provides ballast and bowsprit to Nigel’s cosmical mind. The nautical metaphor is not just whimsy: Nap Eyes are all Nova Scotians by raising and temperament, acclimated to life on an Atlantic peninsula linked narrowly to the rest of North America. Brad is a physical guitarist whose lyrical grace is matched only by the dark ferocity of his feedback-laced solos, while Salter and Dalton exercise an unassuming mind-meld melodicism and vigor with their gentle thrumming.
Nap Eyes will tour Europe this spring in support of I’m Bad Now.