Partway through Nap Eyes’ third record, singer/guitarist Nigel Chapman reveals what he likes to listen to when he’s out for a stroll—and it’s not the Velvet Underground or Pavement or Yo La Tengo or any of the other archetypal indie rock bands to which his Nova Scotian quartet are routinely compared. Sure, Chapman still very much sounds like a Lou Reed who hails from Canada’s East Coast instead of New York’s East Village, but at the moment his interests seem to lay far beyond the rock canon. On the campfire-ready acoustic reprieve “Follow Me Down,” he sings, “Went out walking with my headphones on, classical Indian raga, 20 minutes long/Then I listened to old American folk song/Little bit shorter, still a lot going on.”
“Follow Me Down” is much closer in style to the latter form, even as its subliminal feedback drones try to tilt it toward the former. But that lyric is less a catalog of Champan’s direct influences than a snapshot of the internal contradiction at the core of Nap Eyes’ music—namely, the band’s desire to zone out into zen states versus Chapman’s tendency to share every existential observation bouncing through the synapses of his brain. If folk songs were the original social-media posts, then on I’m Bad Now, Chapman has more than enough on his mind to overwhelm a 280-character limit and then some.
I’m Bad Now is a somewhat cheeky title coming from a band that exudes such a chilled-out, endearing sense of bonhomie. But the commitments to self-improvement and healthy living that permeated 2016’s Thought Rock Fish Scale assume a more cutting tone here, as if Chapman was taking a more aggressive tack to weed out the toxic relationships and unnecessary noise in his life. On the title track, the song’s easy-going jangle belies a biting self-critique, one that leaves Chapman so exhausted that all he can say in the end is “you’re so dumb.” A few songs later, amid the motorik country-rock of “Roses,” he’s plumbing the uneasy feeling of having to maintain pleasant appearances in the face of unwanted attention: “Somebody sent you roses/Now what do you do with them/You’ve got no reason to trim them/No nice place to throw them/Because it doesn’t seem right to throw them away/Yet you can’t very well send them back the other way.” Even at his most withering, Chapman remains nothing if not polite.
Chapman’s—and by extension the band’s—calm demeanor can trick you into thinking there’s not a lot happening in any given Nap Eyes song. And as you hear throughout the album, Chapman is fond of circling back to his opening verses and repurposing them as choruses, changing his inflection and emphasis every so slightly to create just the right amount of dynamic definition. But as Nap Eyes retrace their steps, they’re digging into new ground underfoot. When “Roses” introduces a surprise chorus hook in the song’s dying moments, it’s like suddenly finding your lost car keys in a room that you’ve already searched 20 times over.
I’m Bad Now is a more forthright, steady-going listen than Thought Rock Fish Scale, and, on first pass, it seems a touch less enchanting than that record’s nocturnal reveries. The new album shows Nap Eyes can certainly excel at tight, snappy power-pop (check the incisive opener “Every Time the Feeling”). But there are also all-too-brief flashes of viscerality that you wish the band had explored further—like the noisy, chicken-scratched outburst that momentarily erupts from the simmering build of “Judgment,” or the glorious arena-rockin’ surge that upsets the otherwise mellow slide-guitar sweep of “Sage,” but stops short of elevating the song into Nap Eyes’ own “Impossible Germany.”
The real jamming on I’m Bad Now isn’t happening on the fretboards, but in the lyrics. Atop the countrified dream-pop of “Hearing the Bass,” he revels in the words of songwriter Danika Vandersteen like a guitarist indulges in arpeggios, and practically comes up with a new Dr. Seuss book in the process: “Want to wonder, to watch, to weather, to whisper a tune/To whimper, to will, too well/Swelter, swallow, to switch, to swim, two swan too/To swing, to sing, to sting, to stone, to tone.” But he saves his most bon mots for the astounding “White Disciple,” where the religious undercurrents that have always coursed through Nap Eyes’ music roil into a tsunami. Part Pixies bass rumble, part soulful “Beast of Burden” sway, the song proves to be Chapman’s Mangum opus, a breathless meditation on faith and vice that burrows a winding path from Christianity to Hinduism.
It also happens to contain the album’s best joke: After cycling through seven biblically dense verses, Chapman finally reaches his protagonist’s moment of spiritual awakening, and the only way he can describe it is by unleashing a long, deeply satisfying “shhiiiiiiiiiiiiitttttt” worthy of Clay Davis. Coming from such an eloquent wordsmith, it’s a jarring jump from sacred to profane—but clearly for him, being bad has never felt so good.
