The nautical metaphor is not just whimsy: Nap Eyes are all Nova Scotians by raising and temperament, acclimated to life on an Atlantic peninsula linked narrowly to the rest of North America (“Follow Me Down,” with its “broad cove” and bay, and “Boats Appear,” with its “steam trails rising from the sea,” both offer an evocative sense of place for these otherwise mental mysteries.) Brad is a physical guitarist whose lyrical grace is matched only by the dark ferocity of his feedback-laced solos. While Nigel composes Nap Eyes songs in their inchoate form at home in Halifax, Brad Loughead (lead guitar), Josh Salter (bass), and Seamus Dalton (drums), who live a twelve-hour drive away in Montreal, augment and arrange them, transubstantiating his skeletal, ruminative wafers into discourses that aim to transcend what Nigel, in the song “Dull Me Line,” self-laceratingly deems “bored and lazy disappointment art.” The band provides ballast and bowsprit to Nigel’s cosmical mind. Is that faith or fantasy? And what is the difference? The title is also, of course, a sly Michael Jackson appropriation. Perhaps goodness will manifest in the multiverse, on a different circuit than this faulty, frayed one. The brilliantly reductive title is something I’ve heard my four-year-old son and his friends announce verbatim when roleplaying the perennial game of heroes and villains, “good guys” and “bad guys.” “I’m bad now,” he declares, but an equivocal binary is implied: it’s only a matter of time or trading places before he (or anyone) has the capacity for good again. I’m Bad Now, the most transparent and personal Nap Eyes album to date, constitutes the third chapter of an implicit, informal trilogy that includes Whine of the Mystic (2015) and Thought Rock Fish Scale (2016). In this role, the song-persona, if not the songwriter, resembles a monkish, beatifically stoned Columbo, vigilantly squinty-eyed in his metaphysical quest for self-understanding, despite ostensible bumbling on the physical plane. These songs position the band’s enigmatic songwriter Nigel Chapman as a Stapledonian “cosmical mind,” an existential detective who interrogates social, psychological, and spiritual milieus for clues about the elusive nature of knowledge. So the ambitious, allusive new album by the Canadian band Nap Eyes is an anomaly. They don’t usually arrive in digestible pop song or meme form. Outside of science fiction-IRL-we rarely find those answers, or even those inquiries. These convoluted circumstances are encountered by Stapledon’s first-person narrator, a human being whose disembodied “cosmical mind” roves unmoored through eternally expanding spatiotemporal scales, like some kind of cosmological detective searching for origins and eventualities. But British philosopher Olaf Stapledon’s description in his 1937 novel Star Maker is earlier and weirder, with its tactile, slightly foul, and rather terrifying description of universes “exfoliating,” like some kind of cosmic dandruff, from every critter’s every potential course of action. The concept of the multiverse-the theoretical existence of infinite universes parallel to or interpenetrating our own-exists as a ripe conceit in fiction as well as physics, with Jorge Luis Borges’s 1941 story “The Garden of Forking Paths” perhaps the most famous literary contemplation. Since in every evolutionary sequence of the cosmos there were very many creatures, and each was constantly faced with many possible courses, and the combination of all their courses were innumerable, an infinity of distinct universes exfoliated from every moment of every temporal sequence in this cosmos. In one inconceivably complex cosmos, whenever a creature was faced with several possible courses of action, it took them all, thereby creating many distinct temporal dimensions and distinct histories of the cosmos. 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. The 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. Album page: Artist page: Other options (physical/download/streaming): /PoB33
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