Nap Eyes Reveal "Lion in Chains" From New Album Thought Rock Fish Scale out on 5 Feb via Paradise of Bachelors
REVEAL NEW TRACK “LION IN CHAINS”
NEW ALBUM THOUGHT ROCK FISH SCALE OUT 5 FEB
ON PARADISE OF BACHELORS
Listen to “Lion in Chains” here
Nap Eyes release their new album, Thought Rock Fish Scale on 5th February via Paradise of Bachelors. Today they share the album’s centerpiece, “Lion In Chains“, an almost seven minute long epic. It is one of several movingly ineffable moments on the album that gathers loved ones and legacies at a cautious if affectionate distance, folding them into carefully articulated but centerless khans. In the shivering, anthemic track, the eponymous beast hangs, heraldic and haunted by hometown nostalgia, above singer and audience alike—but only following a beautifully banal stanza about the hot water heater problems at the laboratory where singer Nigel Chapman works as a biochemist.
Recorded live to tape, with no overdubs, on the North Shore of Nova Scotia, Canada’s Nap Eyes’ quietly contemplative second 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 their debut Whine of the Mystic. But the briny, cold Atlantic roils beneath these exquisite, literate guitar pop songs, posing uneasy riddles about friendship, faith, mortality, and self-doubt.
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.
The band will be heading out on tour in the States and Canada over the next few months and will be hitting Austin for SXSW from
Wednesday 16 March to Friday 18 March, more info TBA.
LISTEN:
“Mixer” stream
“Roll It” stream
PRAISE FOR NAP EYES:
“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.”
– Uncut
“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 (4/5 stars)
“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.”
– 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].”
“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.”
“Nap Eyes’ 2014 LP Whine of the Mystic was a brainy sort of daydream. Built on the genteel lilt of windswept electric guitars, swooning dramatic tension, and songwriter Nigel Chapman’s bookish lyricism, it felt sorta like falling asleep with a Velvets record playing in the distance and your nose in some weighty tome. It was deftly written indie pop… ‘Mixer’…brings with it the promise of more rambling romanticism.”
– SPIN
Pre-order Thought Rock Fish Scale:
iTunes – http://smarturl.it/PoB24iT
Paradise of Bachelors – http://www.paradiseofbachelors.com/pob-24
Nap Eyes online:
https://www.facebook.com/Nap-Eyes-201393809940182/
http://www.paradiseofbachelors.com/