RA Reviews: Edward & Oskar Offermann - You Said Party, I Said Maybe on WHITE Records (Single)

Though the title's surely tongue-in-cheek, Berlin's Oskar Offermann and Edward actually do a pretty good job of capturing a clubber's ambivalence on the A-side of their new single for Offermann's WHITE label, their first together in two years. (The title is a reference to the Canadian indie band You Say Party! We Say Die!, which was shortened to You Say Party after the drummer died of a brain hemorrhage.) The shuffly, shaker-filled 909 groove is plenty tough, but languid Rhodes chords and bassline translate as a kind of reluctance. You can feel the tune roping you in, though, with distant crowd noises applying subliminal peer pressure; by the time it's run its course, "maybe" has almost certainly turned to "Well, OK, maybe one more hour..." Studiously deep and dutifully dusky, it's not going to shake up any preconceptions about house music, but it's not supposed to—if it coaxes you back on the floor, it's done its work.

The B-side track is made of similar stuff, down to the faraway voices, but it's far more direct, cutting vocal loops into insistent one-bar phrases and hitting below the belt with a bassline so low it barely scans as notes, just a juicy thud. They make the most of the track's nearly nine minutes, holding back and then opening up into a long, teasing arc that never seems to peak. From the vocal techniques to the dissonant chords, it's very much in a Moodymann style, but that hardly distracts from its own immediacy.