{"title":"Nap Eyes","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNap Eyes is a band hailing from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Known for their introspective lyrics and melodic indie rock sound, they have gained a dedicated following in the music scene. Drawing inspiration from artists such as *Dick Stusso*, *Bonny Doon*, and *Omni*, Nap Eyes has crafted a unique musical style that resonates with listeners.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWith influences ranging from *Ultimate Painting* to *A. Savage*, their music combines catchy guitar riffs with thoughtful storytelling. Fans of bands like *Sam Evian* and *Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever* will appreciate Nap Eyes' laid-back yet captivating sound.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eHaving shared stages with notable acts like *Ought* and *Dick Diver*, Nap Eyes continues to make waves in the indie rock genre. Their music captures the essence of artists like *The Goon Sax* and *The Glands*, while also drawing comparisons to bands such as *Twerps* and even the late David Berman's project, Purple Mountains.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"snapshot-of-a-beginner-love-record-stores-variant","title":"Snapshot of a Beginner (Love Record Stores Variant)","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis one’s for the procrastinators and the slow learners. This one’s for the bungled and the botched, for the fumbled and humbled. This one’s for the late bloomers, and ultimately, Nap Eyes latest full length \u003ci\u003eSnapshot of a Beginner\u003c\/i\u003e is proof that sometimes, the late bloomers bloom brightest. Eight years and four albums into it, the artistic arc of Nap Eyes finds itself tracing a line alongside frontman Nigel Chapman’s daily tai chi practice. Those first years and albums are the cold mornings in the park: the measured movements, the joint aches, the self-doubt. With each new release, an incremental and invigorating step forward. And with the end of each album and tour, a return to the beginner’s practice. And now, \u003ci\u003eSnapshot of a Beginner\u003c\/i\u003e, Nap Eyes’s boldest, most concentrated and most hi-fi album to date, a study of that repeated return and all that it can teach you. Almost all the songs of Nap Eyes are whittled into their final form from Chapman’s unspooling, 20-minute voice-and-guitar free-writing sessions. Each member — drummer Seamus Dalton; bassist Josh Salter or guitarist Brad Loughead — then plays a crucial role in song development, composing around the idiosyncratic structures and directing the overall sound and feel of the songs. Until now, that final song construction and recording has been mostly done live in a room. But for \u003ci\u003eSnapshot of a Beginner\u003c\/i\u003e, the band went to The National’s neuvo-legendary upstate NY Long Pond Studio, working with producers Jonathan Low (Big Red Machine, The National) and James Elkington (Steve Gunn, Joan Shelley), the latter of whom also did pre-production arrangement work with the band. It took Nap Eyes a long time and a long practice to reach this artistic zen, but one gets the feeling throughout \u003ci\u003eSnapshot of a Beginner\u003c\/i\u003e that this balance is going to hold.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Jagjaguwar","offers":[{"title":"Green | LP","offer_id":50416982950219,"sku":"1108466","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/2df73118-9aaa-45ef-ae0a-e3131534f95d_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726713523"},{"product_id":"the-neon-gate","title":"The Neon Gate","description":"\u003cp\u003eAfter 3 years of silence, the Canadian band Nap Eyes have returned with their own meditations on the monstrous and familiar (or the monstrously familiar). \u003ci\u003eThe Neon Gate\u003c\/i\u003e, their metamorphic 5th long-player, collects a cache of 9 fascinating reveries recorded over the 4 years since their last album, \u003ci\u003eSnapshot of a Beginner\u003c\/i\u003e (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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat 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.” In between, piloted by the band’s subtle, synthetic rhythms, “Feline Wave Race” emerges from Chapman’s current improvisational writing practice and experiments with spontaneous composition. We are transported, in the company of a digital wildcat, from deep space through telescoping deep time “when the gas clouds \/ pass away and \/ the molecules \/ distribute \/ all across the fabric \/ of the horizon” from “the edge of the moat \/ of the 13th-century castle” to 1996, the year Nintendo released the jetskiing video game Wave Race 64.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe 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). The origins of even the most otherworldy songs were often intimately domestic. Although most vocals were tracked live with the band, Nigel recorded his vocals for “Feline Wave Race” and “Dark Mystery Enigma Bird,” two disjunctive fables about animals told through stream-of-consciousness narratives, in a blanket-draped children’s cardboard castle in his parents’ basement.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen they exist at all verse-chorus-verse structures often disintegrate in favor of an unhurried unfolding, an emphasis on marking, attenuating, and collapsing time over standard musical notions of progression or refrain, a foregrounding of ellipsis over resolution. Only the careening “Ice Grass Underpass,” written in 2009, predating the band’s existence but prefiguring the sonic signature of their foundational first two albums, closely resembles, with Labelle’s snowy guitar squall (also evident in his lacerating, atonal leads scribbling through “Tangent Dissolve”), their older material. Speaking of snow: half-blinded by a blizzard and in danger of losing their way and plunging “headlong into some damned ravine,” the “master” and coachman of “Demons” are first mystified and then petrified by eerie apparitions of uncanny but uncertain spectral nature. “Is there a witch who is getting married?” the coachman speculates earnestly. “Some goblin they’re burying?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor fans of Yo La Tengo, The Only Ones, Swell Maps, The Modern Lovers, Felt, The Clean, The Verlaines, The Go-Betweens, Kurt Vile, Courtney Barnett, Belle and Sebastian, all things Lou Reed.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50447177810251,"sku":"2213459","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50447177613643,"sku":"2213458","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Nap_Eyes_-_The_Neon_Gate_ff709109_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727073019"},{"product_id":"whine-of-the-mystic","title":"Whine of the Mystic","description":"\u003cp\u003eNova Scotia's Nap Eyes is the greatest band you've never heard, and Whine of the Mystic is their first full-length album, a brilliant small-batch brew of crooked, literate guitar pop refracted through the gray Halifax rain. Recorded live to tape with no overdubs, it's equal parts shambling and sophisticated, with one eye on the dirt and one trained on the starry firmament, inhabiting a skewed world where odes to NASA and the Earth's magnetic field coexist easily with songs about insomnia and drinking too much. Nap Eyes' keen sonic signature cruises briskly and beautifully along the dog-eared axes of jangle-jaded Oceanic pop music (The Clean, The Verlaines, The Go-Betweens), and through the backpages of Peter Perrett (The Only Ones) via all things Lou Reed without ever sounding very much like anything else happening today. Whine of the Mystic articulates the urgency of youthful grace. It's the sound of being young and alive in the city, a tenuous and impermanent counterpoise of recklessness and anxiety, archness and earnestness. \"The very harvest of our youth,\" indeed!\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":50492996452683,"sku":"390259","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP","offer_id":50492996845899,"sku":"390258","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/e4e99859-734a-436b-b43b-16eeb6b1abc0_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727694831"},{"product_id":"thought-rock-fish-scale","title":"Thought Rock Fish Scale","description":"\u003cp\u003eRecorded live to tape, with no overdubs, on the North Shore of Nova Scotia, Nap Eyes' quietly contemplative sophomore record refines and elaborates their debut, offering an airier, more spacious second chapter, a bracing blast of bright oceanic sunshine after the moonlit alleys of 'Whine of the Mystic'. But the briny, cold Atlantic roils beneath these exquisite, literate guitar pop songs, posing riddles about friendship, faith, mortality, and self-doubt. Like all of their recordings to date, the album is framed by a set of severe self-imposed strictures: a mere four days to capture as many songs as possible completely live, with no overdubs, to a temperamental old TEAC four-track 1\/4\" tape recorder. The result is a document pristine in its intentional imperfections. After the dark, drunken night of 'Whine of the Mystic' (recorded nocturnally in Montreal), 'Thought Rock Fish Scale' brings blinding sunlight and blue horizon to these elemental stories of water, fire, and spirit. Compared with its predecessor, this album is far less concerned with the effects of alcohol—excepting \"Click Clack,\" with its admission that \"Sometimes, drinking, I feel so happy but then \/ I can't remember why ... Sometimes, drinking, I don't know my best friend for my best friend\"—and more concerned with negotiating the mornings after, all the hungover or otherwise creaky, tentative new mornings of a life assembled from discrete days. Musically, a new delicacy and tautness manifest here as well, a patient willingness to wait; Josh Salter (bass), Seamus Dalton (drums), and Brad Loughead (lead guitar) exhibit consummate restraint. Sonic touchstones remain similar—The Go-Betweens (particularly Robert Forster's melancholic bite). 'Thought Rock Fish Scale' deploys the language of anxiety and self-reflection as a sort of symbolic vernacular. Nap Eyes make soul music, in the sense that their music describes, from a position of uneasy humility, the often mundane maintenance of the fragile human soul.... For fans of The Only Ones\/England's Glory, The Modern Lovers, The Clean, The Verlaines, The Go-Betweens, Bedhead, and all things Lou Reed. LP With lyrics, color inner sleeve, and download code.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Paradise of Bachelors","offers":[{"title":"CD","offer_id":50493762699595,"sku":"397590","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP","offer_id":50493764960587,"sku":"397589","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/e0ee8aeb-10ca-4d29-a086-23843e415096_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727700336"},{"product_id":"i-m-bad-now","title":"I'm Bad Now","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe acclaimed Canadians return with an ambitious, allusive third album that 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. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLP - Black 140 Gram virgin vinyl LP housed in heavy-duty reverse board jacket, colour inner sleeve with band photos and lyrics, and Download.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCD - Housed in 6-panel jacket with LP replica artwork and lyrics. CD format includes exclusive bonus track \u003ci\u003eBoats Appear.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLP+ - Limited Coloured 140 Gram virgin vinyl LP housed in heavy-duty reverse board jacket, colour inner sleeve with band photos and lyrics, and Download.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Jagjaguwar","offers":[{"title":"LP.","offer_id":50497657766219,"sku":"1028618","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"LP","offer_id":50497658552651,"sku":"1027590","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50497659437387,"sku":"1027588","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/257ed088-a6d3-47a4-ac93-8eec73d7bf8b_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727729751"},{"product_id":"snapshot-of-a-beginner","title":"Snapshot of a Beginner","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis one’s for the procrastinators and the slow learners. 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