Description
2026, 12″ LP, AD 93.
The second album from Danish songwriter and producer Gus Bernsten (aka GB) finds him heading into the Swedish wilderness with a merry band of musicians, a stash of copies of the Metro, a pair of scissors and, apparently, a box set of The Simpsons season six. Cutting up his copies of the Metro, he crafted his lyrics from the resulting mash of the nonsensical and the utterly sensible. Musically, GB and Herzsprung are similarly driven to deconstruct and rebuild. Taking aspects of jazz, pop, post-rock and straight-ahead rock, the songs that make up Herzsprung are both meandering and somehow quite immediate. There’s a slacker feel to the likes of ‘Starsound’ and ‘Pipe Dream’ that harks back to that period in the 90s when front rooms around the globe were a smoky haze filled with pizza boxes, MTV and heavy-lidded folks grinning at nothing much in particular. While there is a distinct DIY stoner aesthetic to Herzsprung, there’s a brooding intensity lurking beneath the surface of many of these songs. The strings and haunted backing vocals that underpin the constantly shifting guitars of ‘The Next Day’ suggest a darkness lurking somewhere in the future. However, despite this darkness, GB’s approach is so laid back that his invitation to explore and reinvent is impossible to resist.
