Nap Eyes’ metamorphic fifth long-player collects a cache of nine fascinating songs recorded over the four years since Snapshot of a Beginner. The Neon Gate reveals classic touchstones (the uneasy interplay of physics and philosophy, perambulatory meditations, self-interrogating soliloquies, apertures of surreality, video games), but also evidence of divergent impulses toward nonlinear abstraction and longform improvisational composition (resulting in their most discursive, deconstructed, and deliquescent songs to date) and narrative and lyric formality (including adaptations of thorny poems by Alexander Pushkin and W. B. Yeats), imparting the sense that Nap Eyes have transmuted, as has their understanding of what a song is, what it can do, where it might go. (Including color inner sleeve with lyrics.)Masters of subtlety. – NPRSnapshot of a Beginner feels as much a modest masterpiece as [The Go-Betweens’] Spring Hill Fair or [Belle and Sebastian’s] Tigermilk. What sets them apart is the fear and trembling. – UncutOne of the most fascinating songwriters we have today. – Newsweek
