Nova 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.
Highlights
- RIYL The Only Ones/England’s Glory, The Modern Lovers, The Clean, The Verlaines, The Go-Betweens, Nikki Sudden, Bedhead, and all things Lou Reed
- Available on virgin vinyl as an LP, with heavy-duty chipboard jacket, full-color inner sleeve, and lyrics, as well as on gatefold matte CD and digital formats.
- Vinyl edition includes digital download coupon.
Physical format music purchases from the PoB webstore and Bandcamp include digital downloads when feasible. Some, but not all, pre-2023 vinyl pressings also include a download coupon. For digital preorders and high-resolution digital downloads, please visit our Bandcamp page.
Tracklist
A1. “Mixer” 4.36
A2. “Stargazer” 4.13
A3. “Lion in Chains” 6.40
A4. “Don’t Be Right” 2.24
B1. “Click Clack” 4.29
B2. “Alaskan Shake” 5.11
B3. “Roll It” 3.05
B4. “rust” 2.41
Catalog Number/Release Date
PoB-020 / July 10, 2015
Purchase from PoB above or support via
- Bandcamp (LP/CD/digital)
- Other Options (LP/CD/digital/streaming)
- Local Record Stores
More from Nap Eyes
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Nap Eyes: The Neon Gate
$9.00 – $35.00Nap Eyes: Demons
$1.00 – $2.00Nap Eyes: Feline Wave Race
$3.00 – $4.00Nap Eyes: Snapshot of a Beginner
Weight N/A FORMAT Album Narrative
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- Photo by Steve Louie.
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- Photo by Mohammad Melebari.
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- Photo by Colin Medley.
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- Photo by Colin Medley.
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- Photo by Colin Medley.
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- Photo by Colin Medley.
Drink wine, for it is everlasting day.
It is the very harvest of our youth;
In time of roses, wine and comrades gay,
Be happy, drink, for that is life in sooth.– Omar Khayyám
*
The record’s punning title references (and wryly deflates) the great 11th-century Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet Omar Khayyám’s famous propensity for wine-soaked mysticism. Songwriter, singer, and rhythm guitarist Nigel Chapman’s songs share with Khayyám—a rather quaintly old-fashioned inspiration—a certain vinous preoccupation that may well lubricate the similarly conversational tone and philosophical focus. Throughout the record, workaday details punctuate (and puncture) cosmic concerns, as Nigel wrestles with air and angels, struggling (and often failing) to reconcile the Romantic rifts, both real and imagined, that define our lives: between chaos and order (or wilderness and paradise, as in “Tribal Thoughts”); solipsism and fellowship (“Dreaming Solo” vs. “Oh My Friends”); the anxiety of social (dis)orders both big and small (“The Night of the First Show”; “No Man Needs to Care”); and the various intersections and oppositions of religion, art, and science (“Dark Creedence” and “Make Something.”)
The latter three collapsing categories ring particularly relevant for Chapman, a biochemist who spends his weekdays in a research lab, mutating the gene/DNA encoding of a cell-surface receptor protein. As with us all, our diurnal labor and studies inform our creativity, day creeps into night, and so it’s no surprise that sicknesses of “brain protein aggregation” and “up-regulated oncogene” appear in “Make Something,” infecting, by proximity, the more traditionally songwriterly tropes of heart sickness that haunt “Oh My Friends” and “Dreaming Solo.” The two longest and most ambitious songs here, “Delirium and Persecution Paranoia” (which takes place, in part, within the Earth’s core) and “No Fear of Hellfire” (which takes place, appropriately, on a Sunday morning) clatter and buzz along with heedless momentum, tackling, respectively, unstable psychology and geology, and the riddles and contradictions of faith. The songs resonate because they manage to delicately balance the cryptic and the quotidian, rendering a compellingly honest equivocation without evasiveness, a relatable ambivalence without apathy.
Originally released in 2014 by Plastic Factory Records in a highly limited edition of 200 LPs, Whine of the Mystic has gone largely unheard beyond the finely-tuned ears of Montreal and the Maritime Provinces, so Paradise of Bachelors is delighted to introduce it to more Southerly climes. In typically insular Halifax music scene fashion, Nap Eyes shares three of its four members—Josh Salter (bass), Seamus Dalton (drums), and Brad Loughead (lead guitar)—with two other notable local bands, comrades and sometime touring partners Monomyth (Josh and Seamus’s project) and Each Other (which includes Brad as well as Nap Eyes recording engineer Mike Wright.) Though the indelibly wistful vocal melodies are Nigel’s, Josh, Seamus, and Brad are the primary architects of Nap Eyes’ keen sonic signature, which 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, England’s Glory) and Nikki Sudden (Swell Maps, Jacobites), via all things Lou Reed and Modern Lovers, without ever sounding very much like anything else happening today.
Part of the secret of Nap Eyes may reside in their avowed recording method, which eschews any overdubs in favor of capturing the immediacy and singularity of full-band live performances. Nigel explains their methodology best: “You get the feeling of the song; everyone’s feeling, all as one take in time, so things fit together naturally, and even mistakes sound natural. This not to discredit any of the incredible recordings made by different principles; it’s just its own kettle of fish.” As a result, both lyrically and musically, 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!
Nap Eyes will release a follow-up album of all-new material in early 2016, likewise brought to you by You’ve Changed Records (in Canada) and Paradise of Bachelors (throughout the rest of the world.)
Videos and Streaming
Acknowledgments
8.0. Chapman has one of those voices that feels immediately familiar, yet is bracingly distinct… one the most intriguingly idiosyncratic lyricists in Canadian indie rock this side of Dan Bejar. Even in its quietest moments, Thought Rock Fish Scale is an album brimming with passion and protest. It finds confidence in humility, power in relaxation. Its lethargy feels like an act of defiance against the hyper-speed pace of modern life. Its pledges of sobriety and good health constitute affronts to peer-pressured intoxication and food-blogged indulgence. And its purity of vision amounts to a declaration of war against a culture that encourages mass distraction. Let this record be the first step in your rehabilitation from information overload.
– Stuart Berman, Pitchfork
The year’s first classic indie rock album. For my money, Nap Eyes are one of the best rock bands in business today, handily spanning the space between Bob Dylan and The Microphones. Nigel Chapman’s songwriting grips like the best of them. A timeless release, already.
– Duncan Cooper, The FADER
An existentialist indie pop daydream. Wonderfully and beautifully frigid — frozen in time and place, despite its humid surroundings.
– Colin Joyce, SPIN
Chapman has been compared to Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and Jonathan Richman, among other singularly compelling singer-songwriters. If tracks like “Roll It,” “Mixer,” and the seven-minute epic “Lion in Chains” are any indication, this album is only going to cement Chapman’s status as one of the most fascinating songwriters we have today.
– Newsweek
Nap Eyes are one of my favourite bands in Canada. Four cats from Halifax recording lazy, rangey rock’n’roll – “Roll It” is a rocker’s stoned jam but it’s also epistemology – a marauding dissertation on what we know and how we know it. Nigel Chapman sings his lines with a certain distance, Father Superior and his riddles, but the band is affectless, profane, casual as a bowl of cereal. I figure this is usually the way with gurus: well-spoken long-hairs and their roving, loyal, merry men.
– Sean Michaels, The Globe and Mail
It’s easy to imagine Lou Reed’s ghost giving Nap Eyes his gruffly benevolent blessing, impressed by their unvarnished diarizing in lean, art-pop songs that channel his spirit. But along with kitchen-sink detail, there’s real poignancy in the Canadians’ second set. Astutely played, instant charmers.
– Sharon O’Connell, Uncut
4/5 stars. It’s almost a relief to hear the stoical guitar-bass-drums simplicity of this quartet. Concise, understated alt rock with cryptic, literate lyrics for Go-Betweens/Bill Callahan fans.
– MOJO
You don’t wanna miss them: purveyors of beatific, sun-drenched US roadtrip tunes, they’re a laid-back, summery affair at first glance. Dig deeper though and there’s much to get lost in. Subtle and intricate, they’re an impressive outfit… Frontman Nigel Chapman [is] owner of one of the most beautiful voices I’ve heard in years. He’s a fucking great singer, and an impressive lyricist to boot.
– Matt Wilkinson, NME
4/5 stars. There is a down-at-heel yet often sublime feel from Nap Eyes’ second album. Of the album’s eight tracks, it’s almost impossible to single out one that doesn’t hit the singular mark between structured and untidy, but the likes of “Stargazer,” “Lion in Chains,” and “Trust” nonetheless manage to convey the vagaries of control without in any way spoiling the end result. Reckless? Wistful? A little bit skewed? All these and more.
– Tony Clayton-Lea, The Irish Times
Incredible album. Nap Eyes is a great band that will remind you of a lot of great things. Songwriter and guitarist Nigel Chapman, a biochemist by day, is the kind of preternaturally smart lyricist who inspires comparison to Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Van Morrison, and the many odd musicians who fall between. There’s a lot of good connections one could make listening to something so clearly labored over but also seemingly effortless. If you haven’t been listening to much rock music lately, Nap Eyes will make you remember why rock’s good in the first place.
– The FADER
Best New Artists of 2016. Lou Reed isn’t dead, he’s just living in Halifax. This would be “slacker rock” incarnate, if slackers asked heady questions about the impermanence of consciousness and the naiveté of trust.
– The Observer
To live with this record is to hear it unfurl a beauty and intelligence some might have feared extinct. Awash with delicate wit and poignancy, this is traditional rock music only in that these are well-read kids from an isolated location who have made the music they hear inside their heads, not off the internet.
– Sean Rabin, Sydney Morning Herald
8/10. One of the most enjoyable and insightful albums released this year so far. It sounds like Pavement, circa-1999, playing a stripped down Stax Records house band slow jam… like Lou Reed hanging out with Guided by Voices. As you get more and more inebriated it all starts to make sense, making it the best thing you’ve ever heard!
– Nick Roseblade, Drowned in Sound
The effect is something akin to the talking blues antics of Mark Kozelek‘s last few albums, but with a lot more self-control and no references to crab cakes or Ben Gibbard. So it goes for the rest of Thought Rock Fish Scale as well, with Chapman poring over his existential fears and failings as a human while he and the rest of the band rumble along quietly in the background invoking the spirits of Flying Nun Records and Sarah Records’ past.
– Robert Ham, Paste
34 minutes of soothing acoustic melodies that will transport you from the cold and rain of our bleak isles to the warmth to the warmth of a Nova Scotian log cabin in the space of a single listen.
– The ShortList (UK)
Some of the Velvet Underground’s best moments came with the volume turned way down, and that’s precisely where Nap Eyes picks up the story. Nap Eyes hails from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and it’s easy to hear that rainy chill in its music. “Mixer”–from Thought Rock Fish Scale, out February 5 via Paradise of Bachelors–is all atmosphere. You’re looking over Chapman’s shoulder as the room comes into view.
– Art Levy, KUTX
Chapman’s questions are heart-wrenching in their simplicity. Get ready to get a little existential.
– Collin Robinson, Stereogum
Acclaim for Nap Eyes’ Whine of the Mystic:
Nap Eyes moves from psych-riffs to astrophysicists; from Rubaiyatic poetry to punctuated bass, in easy fluid motions. Chapman’s calm, steady voice can be as pained as Bob Dylan’s, and his lyrics can be just as profound.
– Adria Young, Noisey
Unkempt rock songs that are steeped in tradition yet impossible to pin down. Nigel Chapman sings with an observational deadpan that echoes back to the likes of Lou Reed, Jonathan Richman, and David Berman. This guy spends his days studying the infinite complexity of seemingly simplistic cells, and his songs function the same way. There are worlds inside [these] little three-chord lament[s].
– Chris DeVille, Stereogum
Whine of the Mystic is a necessarily dense title for a band like Nap Eyes, its multitudes containing additional multitudes. This is a drinker’s album, for the kind of drinker who does so alone, publicly, poring over popular 11th-century tomes.
– Ian Cohen, Pitchfork
These spindly, sophisto-naïve songs about friendship, uncertainty, belief, and heavy drinking suggest Lou Reed reared on The Clean and The Verlaines. But rather than a drawl or sneer, there’s vulnerability on Chapman’s lazily charming voice.
– Sharon O’Connell, Uncut
Nap Eyes’ Whine of the Mystic is a ragged splendour, one of the best things in ages. A band from Halifax with a sound like young caterpillar and old silk, like the Velvet Underground and Electrelane and Destroyer and Guided by Voices. Like liking a drink you know isn’t good for you; that’s good for you, that’s good for you, that you know isn’t good for you. They are a rock band just so faintly tripping. They are priests of Shaolin and the Holy See, with electric guitars in their hands, with an un-fancy drum-kit. Nap Eyes’ songs are mazey and riddled, but ambivalent about their mazes, ambivalent about their riddles; in this way they remind me of good smoke, holy incense smoke, always true to its incantation.
– Sean Michaels, Said the Gramophone
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