Nap Eyes: Feline Wave Race

EP Narrative

Photo by Anna Maria Trudel.

FIRST TRANSMISSION FROM THE NEON GATE / 20240514 / 0900R

I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?

– Chris Marker, Sans Soleil (1983)

When we last heard from Nap Eyes, in May 2021, in the wake of their fourth full-length record, Snapshot of a Beginner (PoB-058), released in March 2020 at the uncertain brink of the COVID-19 pandemic—their truncated tour with Destroyer was the final concert some of us saw for a year or longer—they were sharing covers by Green Day and Bonnie Raitt, on an EP plainly titled When I Come Around. It was an earthbound exercise, perhaps, in vigorous nostalgia as antidote to the exhaustion of awaiting an unusually unknowable future.

Then, silence—circumstantial but also self-imposed, unvowed but total.

Now, exactly three years later to the day, they’re back with two songs, old and new, that bookend the band’s history, monuments, or mnemonic mile markers, to fifteen years of singular songmaking. It is no coincidence that both songs are themselves concerned with marking, attenuating, and collapsing time.

There are classic Nap Eyes touchstones here—the uneasy interplay of physics and philosophy, perambulatory descriptions of landscape and weather, self-interrogating soliloquies, technological anxiety, apertures of surreality, video games—but also the sense, intentionally and unabashedly exhibited in the contrast, both sonic and lyrical, between the two specimens, that Nap Eyes have transmuted, as has their understanding of what a song is, what it can do, where it might go.

“Ice Grass Underpass,” which singer, principal songwriter, and guitarist Nigel Chapman wrote in 2009, predates the band’s existence entirely but prefigures the sonic signature of Nap Eyes’s foundational first two albums, Whine of the Mystic (2015, PoB-020) and Thought Rock Fish Scale (2016, PoB-024). In this recent rendering, it describes a solipsistic solo walk, ice-grass crunching underfoot, leaning through the snowy scrim of Brad Loughead’s guitar squall. Seasons change, as they always do—“I’ve been hoarding my coal so long / The winter turned to spring”—and time stitches its “squalid seams” of regret and forgetting. Who can remember thirst?

“Feline Wave Race” is something altogether stranger and more novel, emerging from Chapman’s current improvisational writing practice. Piloted by Seamus Dalton and Josh Salter’s subtle, synthetic rhythms, it feels more discursive and deconstructed, more abstract and nonlinear than anything they’ve attempted to date. Over the course of the song’s six-and-a-half-minute duration, a new deliquescent song-signature evolves alongside this narrative of planetary evolution and time travel. This rather leisurely “race” begins after the heat death of the universe, an abiding interest of the cosmically inclined Chapman, finding the narrator “in outer space / when the gas clouds / pass away and / the molecules / distribute / all across the fabric / of the horizon.” We are transported from deep space through telescoping deep time, from “the edge of the moat / of the 13^th-century castle” to 1996, the year Nintendo released the jetskiing video game Wave Race 64.

The narrator’s familiar and companion, following a Franciscan encounter in a cave, is a wildcat, who, in an absurdist sleight of hand reminiscent of the similarly cat-consumed filmmaker Chris Marker, digitizes and surfs “a tidal wave” into the pixelated 64-bit waterways of Wave Race 64.

We’re left with no explanation and no ending, no return journey to our home world, resigned forever to explore the briny digital microcosmos with “that cat, that cat, that cat …”

To be continued …