Sean Nicholas Savage wrote most of Bermuda Waterfall, his 11th studio album since 2008, when traveling while "Trying to describe my most potent dreams related to my most potent life experiences." This is mostly a fancy way of saying he’s a songwriter, but Savage has a memorable way of describing the sights of an otherwise common life. A sun is not a sun, but "a five billion year old fire"; a broken relationship is not a broken relationship, but an "empire of hate." It’s only been a year since his last album, Other Life, and Savage is still singing about the same themes of loneliness and love. But he’s breathed life into his homespun arrangements and learned to dive deeper into himself to recover rarer conclusions, justifying his prolificness.
There’s a soft rock bent to Savage's sound: the drums are unconfrontational, the guitars soft and Spanish-inflected. Savage’s voice is worn out yet piercing, as though a thousand miles couldn’t keep him from getting through. He puts his whole self into the swelling refrain on "Heartless", pleading the title of "Please Set Me Free" while singing from inside what sounds like a rainstorm. The interplay between the fullness of the arrangements and Savage’s often despairing presence provides a viewpoint as to where his imagination takes him on those lonely nights. When he sings "You come naturally to me" to a lover on the lighter-than-air "Naturally", he might as well be talking about his own ability to execute his ideas.
Similar to fellow Canadian and former labelmate Majical Cloudz, there’s a directness to Savage's approach that threatens to become uncomfortable. The ability to reconcile immense expressions of sadness and guilt with awareness is rare—he dives into himself without getting lost—and the songs on Bermuda Waterfall are beautiful and yearning. At the same time, his musical style occasionally toes the line between "cool lounge" and "chintzy infomercial," and as Savage continues to interpret small moments as small failures, it's hard not to tire of the constant introspection.
It's important to keep in mind, then, that Savage's viewpoint is a byproduct of isolation, where one analyzes every experience in search of deeper subtext while avoiding the risk of sounding like a loon when you explain it to someone else. But rather than loitering in solitude, Savage is reaching out his hand: Bermuda Waterfall was written for his friends, whom he memorializes on "Hangin On" for being so thoughtful as to wonder when he might be coming to a party. That*'s* the type of inconsequential, commonplace interaction that sometimes means the world to an individual, and Savage’s ability to locate an oasis of connection in a desert of heartbreak is what makes Bermuda Waterfall endearing rather than irritating.
