[Tsuba Records]

Just as hardware stores supply builders with lumber and nails, British duo Peace Division made a career of peddling reliable if largely unremarkable minimal house grooves to reinforce DJs’ sets. Their understated repertoire has hardly changed in the nearly 15 years spent releasing for Low Pressings, NRK Sound Division, Crosstown Rebels and Tsuba (among others), adjusting slightly with the times to meet DJs needs: Their turn of the century beats were often up-tempo, chunky and a bit tribal, only to reduce during the minimal years and plump up again as “deep” became the operative word. This year the pair decided to hang up the Peace Division moniker for good to pursue solo endeavors, with one last single, “Eh Oh Um,” as their curtain call. Yet in spite of their unshakable consistency, one might expect the duo to go out with a bang, or at least out of the ordinary. Don’t get your hopes up.

With characteristic nonchalance, Peace Division send “Eh Oh Um” on its way with only grainy percussion loops and a guy saying “yep.” Ambling along, it picks up a dull pang, one-off spatters of incidental sound and self-satisfied “mmm mmm mmm” mumbles, affording the track its only source of personality. And while various tweaks modulate the track’s fidelity and intensity, there’s little else worth mentioning — no builds, no hooks, and little to separate “Eh Oh Um” from hundreds of other minimal house with similarly modest ambitions. At least in this measure Christian Burkhardt succeeds, as his unctuous remix, rife with percussive flourishes, detaches the ho-hum vocal samples from beat grids for a more involved feel. The most signs of life are found in wide and rounded contours of the bass line, which lend a light bounce commonly found in Burkhardt’s tracks. That Peace Division opted to go out as they came in — making utilitarian tracks without much fuss — is perhaps tacit acknowledgment they didn’t have much else to say. Their concern was keeping DJs stocked, not climbing the charts (although “Eh Oh Um” inexplicably managed to do both in RA’s May charts, sitting at #3). But if history is written by the victors, practical platters like “Eh Oh Um” may well serve as the pages on which it’s inscribed.