{"id":952,"date":"2015-07-10T00:51:24","date_gmt":"2015-07-10T04:51:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/wordpress_helpful\/?post_type=product&#038;p=952"},"modified":"2023-09-05T23:49:59","modified_gmt":"2023-09-06T03:49:59","slug":"nap-eyes-whine-of-the-mystic-yc-022","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/youvechangedrecords.com\/product\/nap-eyes-whine-of-the-mystic-yc-022\/","title":{"rendered":"Nap Eyes &#8211; Whine Of The Mystic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>&#8220;Nap Eyes\u2019\u00a0<\/em>Whine of the Mystic<em>\u00a0is 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\u2019t good for you; that\u2019s good for you, that\u2019s good for you, that you know isn\u2019t good for you.\u00a0They 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.\u00a0Nap Eyes\u2019 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.&#8221; <\/em><strong>\u2013 <\/strong>Sean Michaels, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.saidthegramophone.com\/archives\/best_songs_of_2014.php\" target=\"_blank\">Said the Gramophone<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\n<iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 100%; height: 42px;\" src=\"https:\/\/bandcamp.com\/EmbeddedPlayer\/album=2554032096\/size=small\/bgcol=ffffff\/linkcol=0687f5\/artwork=none\/track=3927284707\/transparent=true\/\" seamless><a href=\"http:\/\/youvechangedrecords.bandcamp.com\/album\/whine-of-the-mystic\">Whine Of The Mystic by Nap Eyes<\/a><\/iframe><br \/>\n<iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 100%; height: 42px;\" src=\"https:\/\/bandcamp.com\/EmbeddedPlayer\/album=2554032096\/size=small\/bgcol=ffffff\/linkcol=0687f5\/artwork=none\/track=2418864867\/transparent=true\/\" seamless><a href=\"http:\/\/youvechangedrecords.bandcamp.com\/album\/whine-of-the-mystic\">Whine Of The Mystic by Nap Eyes<\/a><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Drink wine, for it is everlasting day.<br \/>\nIt is the very harvest of our youth;<br \/>\nIn time of roses, wine and comrades gay,<br \/>\nBe happy, drink, for that is life in sooth.<br \/>\n\u2013 Omar Khayy\u00e1m<\/p>\n<p>Whine of the Mystic is Nap Eyes 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\u2019s 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\u2019s magnetic field coexist easily with songs about insomnia and drinking too much.<\/p>\n<p>The record\u2019s punning title references (and wryly deflates) the great 11th-century Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet Omar Khayy\u00e1m\u2019s famous propensity for wine-soaked mysticism. Songwriter, singer, and rhythm guitarist Nigel Chapman\u2019s songs share with Khayy\u00e1m\u2014a rather quaintly old-fashioned inspiration\u2014a 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 \u201cTribal Thoughts\u201d); solipsism and fellowship (\u201cDreaming Solo\u201d vs. \u201cOh My Friends\u201d); the anxiety of social (dis)orders both big and small (\u201cThe Night of the First Show\u201d; \u201cNo Man Needs to Care\u201d); and the various intersections and oppositions of religion, art, and science (\u201cDark Creedence\u201d and \u201cMake Something.\u201d)<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s no surprise that sicknesses of \u201cbrain protein aggregation\u201d and \u201cup-regulated oncogene\u201d appear in \u201cMake Something,\u201d infecting, by proximity, the more traditionally songwriterly tropes of heart sickness that haunt \u201cOh My Friends\u201d and \u201cDreaming Solo.\u201d The two longest and most ambitious songs here, \u201cDelirium and Persecution Paranoia\u201d (which takes place, in part, within the Earth\u2019s core) and \u201cNo Fear of Hellfire\u201d (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.<\/p>\n<p>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 and You\u2019ve Changed Records are delighted to make it more widely available. In typically insular Halifax music scene fashion, Nap Eyes shares three of its four members\u2014Josh Salter (bass), Seamus Dalton (drums), and Brad Loughead (lead guitar)\u2014with two other notable local bands, comrades and sometime touring partners Monomyth (Josh and Seamus\u2019s project) and Each Other (which includes Brad as well as Nap Eyes recording engineer Mike Wright.) Though the indelibly wistful vocal melodies are Nigel\u2019s, Josh, Seamus, and Brad are the primary architects of Nap Eyes\u2019 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>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: \u201cYou get the feeling of the song; everyone\u2019s 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\u2019s just its own kettle of fish.\u201d As a result, both lyrically and musically, Whine of the Mystic articulates the urgency of youthful grace. It\u2019s the sound of being young and alive in the city, a tenuous and impermanent counterpoise of recklessness and anxiety, archness and earnestness. \u201cThe very harvest of our youth,\u201d indeed!<\/p>\n<p>-Brendan Greaves, Paradise of Bachelors<\/p>\n<p>LP format is pressed on virgin vinyl\u00a0with heavy-duty chipboard jacket and lyrics insert, and includes a digital download. CD format comes in a gatefold chipboard jacket.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><em>&#8220;Nap Eyes\u2019\u00a0<\/em>Whine of the Mystic<em>\u00a0is 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\u2019t good for you; that\u2019s good for you, that\u2019s good for you, that you know isn\u2019t good for you.\u00a0They are a rock band just so faintly tripping. <\/em><strong>\u2013 <\/strong>Sean Michaels, Said the Gramophone<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":943,"template":"","meta":{"kt_blocks_editor_width":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/youvechangedrecords.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/952"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/youvechangedrecords.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/youvechangedrecords.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youvechangedrecords.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/youvechangedrecords.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}