RELEASEDATE: AUGUST 22ND
incredible strides marks the 9th studio recording of oldseed (11th if you include 2017’s liveset and 2020’s incubates and isolates). Written during a dark time in most of our lives, these songs are sardonic meditations on our collective feeling of defeat. Feelings of fear and anxiety as we embrace our bleak future together. How can we marvel at ourselves as humanity when the reality seems to look alot more like inoperable cancer?
Recorded over two weekends in April 2021, incredible strides was recorded almost entirely as a group with drums, piano, bass, acoustic guitar and voice captured simultaneously. This was only made possible with bjerring surrounding himself with top level musicians (manuel groh, on bass/engineering, max jentzen on drums and michael links on pianos) Only stabs of electric guitar, sythesizer and vocal harmonies were overdubbed. This is in keeping with bjerring’s traditional “hit it and quit it” approach to recording. Only 2005’s “when you laugh” and 2014’s “kost” deviate from this procedural formula.
Sylisticly, incredible strides runs the gammut of roots pop influences. Country, rock, electronic and (gasp) jazz are all used sparingly to decorate oldseed’s signature knife-through-the-heart songwriting. forest lawn plays a fun, classic, country-rock jam over darkly cynical lyrics of ultimate defeatism. rock solid science is an almost area rock ballad to the power of the scientific process. when the kids get old is a funeral dirge mourning the bleakness of our collective future. As usual, oldseed is not only unafraid, but enthusiastic about going to these deep, existential recesses of the human experience. Again oldseed holds a mirror up to the world by, more importantly, holding a mirror up to himself.
