All of Spiderman's lame villains are gonna laugh at me
Until I realized that, I couldn't for the life of my figure out what I was supposed to be looking at. I absolutely loved Sunbather's aesthetic. A black metal album with a orange-washed pink cover? That resonated with me, mostly because I like black metal and like wearing pink but also because it said something about Deafheaven and black metal. Black metal has always had this soft, delicate underbelly that contrasted its bleakness and morbidity in purposefully ironic and productive ways. I mean, the best Burzum songs feature Varg plinking and plunking pretty little notes on a synth. Alcest is, at this point, the prettiest shoegaze band in the world. Deafheaven, too, always embraced melody and ambience to help create a larger story.
That's what made Sunbather so incredible to me (I think it was my second or third favourite record from 2013): its delicacy. Because, really, black metal is fast, loud, aggressive, evil music for big whiny cry babies. You watch George perform, in black jeans and black shirt buttoned all the way to his neck and black boots, and you look at his wide eyes and sneer, and you just know that that dude, like me and you, is a big whiny baby. I mean, the band is named after a line from a Shakespeare sonnet. Literature? That is for sissies.
When NPR initially streamed New Bermuda, I was a bit lukewarm on the album. I listened to it a few times, enough to decide, "I like this," and then waited for the vinyl to be released to buy it and listen to it again. Unfortunately, Criminal Records pushed back the date for the vinyl release for two weeks, so I ended up buying the CD (I'll buy the vinyl when it comes out and gift the CD to Steven probably). I just couldn't not listen to it anymore, and not because I was particularly fond of the first few listens, but because I really wanted to have an opinion about it. More specifically, I wanted to have the opinion that New Bermuda wasn't nearly as good as Sunbather and maybe wasn't even as good as Roads to Judah.
I am a fool. I have striven for foolishness. My foolery is boundless. I've spent all week listening to the three albums (and also the 2-song version of the demo I have on 7"), and New Bermuda is better than Sunbather, and, interestingly, Roads to Judah might be super boring and unmemorable. Really, it shouldn't matter which album is better, but that's how I often think about things, and it's definitely how a lot of people think about a band's new album, especially when it follows such a massive breakout record like Sunbather.
New Bermuda is great. George's vocals are a bit grosser and snarlier, the songs are incredibly well-written and feature fascinating build-ups and transitions that demonstrate how much they've matured in the last two years. It's even a heavier album, with the band incorporating more of what you might call traditional metal riffs into the songs. They're not playing the same black metal on New Bermuda as on Sunbather, but it still feels like Deafheaven. It might not even be black metal anymore? Maybe that's what worried me during my first few listens. But black metal is polymorphous, so why wouldn't it be black metal?
Sunbather is/was a trying record. The cathartic moments of the album are made more cathartic by the amount of time it takes to reach them. It's a long, sprawling album in which the listener is supposed to get dizzy and lost. It's alienating because it's from alienated people. It wears its emotionality like its pink album art. It's intentionally exhausting.
New Bermuda is far more calculated, using its size menacingly rather than being engulfed by the very size of the space it creates. If Sunbather's vast, empty soundscape with cathartic oases and horizons alike, found its accomplishment in the delaying and denying of any sense of completion, then New Bermuda is an accomplishment of full completion and actualization, in that it seems to be exactly what Deafheaven wanted to create. Everything seems to be in its right place on this record, and it's intensely satisfying. In the most positive way, it is an album that is easy to listen to and to listen to repeatedly. It might not be the depressive force that Sunbather was, but it doesn't need to be that. It needs to be - and is - its own monster.
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