Nap Eyes soundscapes burst open on The Neon Gate

More often than not suggesting the songwriter has most likely read quite a few books, and could possibly pen one too. Exposures to Canadian quartet Nap Eyes might make you feel like the order of priority should perhaps be reversed. Instead of literary indie-rock, the work of songwriter Nigel Chapman and co. can come across more like musical (or musically accompanied) literature.

Nap Eyes are far from alone in emphasizing the importance of words: annals of music are full of songwriters and bands who are thoroughly immersed in poetry particularly. A few (notably Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Patti Smith) have also excelled as writers of poetry and/or prose. Whereas the lyrics of Nap Eyes’ contemporary literarily ambitious peers such as, say, Willy Vlautin (of Richmond Fontaine and The Delines, and also an acclaimed novelist) read like ultra-condensed short stories, Chapman’s writing hovers between epically sprawling poetry and monologuing stream-of-consciousness essays, wielding observations and ruminations that range from marveling at the heroic feats of birds in flight (“Eight Tired Starlings) to strange and unsettling dream sequences set in uncertain time and place (“Passageway”).

It could easily curdle into a dry academic exercise of bloodless intellectual gymnastics, but Nap Eyes never lose sight of the importance of keeping the listener on side via alluring soundscapes. Previous Nap Eyes albums have veered towards more conventionally crunchy indie-rock dynamics, but The Neon Gate introduces frostily glistening synth textures and drum programming to the band’s arsenal. The album often also throws song structures open to unexpected twists and diversions: more than half the tracks on The Neon Gate unfurl at their own sweet pace over six minutes or more.

The results can be revelatory: the sad disco throb of “Dark Mystery Enigma Bird” is an instant cult classic, whilst “I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness” sets a poem by W.B. Yeats into a chilly glide that nods classic pioneers of electronic pop. The piano and drum machine-led “Demons” (setting a poem by Alexander Pushkin to music) might just be the highlight here, with the steadily escalating dread of the poem’s recounting of a surreal and perilous frozen nightmare of a horse carriage journey accompanied by the peskiest residents of the netherworld perfectly matched with the band’s understated but gradually intensifying, hypnotic trot. Nap Eyes fare equally well in their more conventional two guitars-bass-drums set-up. “Isolation” floats beatifically across eight unhurried minutes, while “Ice Grass Underpass” exhibits muscular garage-rock dynamics not that far removed from the more assertive moments of Wilco. Only the knotty swerves of “Tangent Dissolve” exhibit any evidence of the words and music not necessarily coinhabiting in total harmony, although the grizzled guitar combustions (definite echoes of the more noisily abstract undertakings of Nels Cline) of Brad Loughead help maintain focus.