- One of the things that made me fall in love with Prosumer and Murat Tepeli's Serenity was the pervasive melancholy that ran through the album. It was one of the most relentlessly retro records of last year, but it reached above mere mimicry because it sounded like, as Jon Pareles in the New York Times put it, "house music utterly deflated."
You certainly can't say that about the duo's latest 12-inch. By far the most upbeat tune that they've ever recorded, "U & I" is nearly pop house, a track whose middle four minutes almost begs for a radio edit. As you might expect, the remit here is classic house sounds with a refrain that implores you to keep your moving feet. You can hear tinges of the melancholic floating around in the background via frequent collaborator Elif Bicer's vocals—she sings the title as well as adding general atmospheric color—but it's pushed back in favor of a robust chord pattern and cobblehorse percussion. "The Jam" follows up the A-side, and comes off like a perfect complement. More driving, it borrows trace elements from its predecessor, but cuts the vocals to a bare minimum and focuses solely on the groove. It's not quite inflated, but it's about as muscle-bound as you're likely to hear this duo ever get.
Tracklist A U & I
B The Jam