Or Best Offer

Or Best Offer

Center

Ba Da Bing!

“I found this on the ground / and I thought of you,” hums Grace Schmidhauser as the first track unfurls on Or Best Offer’s debut album. It’s a deceptively sophisticated mission statement and a perfect introduction to the band’s universe, one where the mundane suggests the holy, where moments of intimacy become tokens of the cosmic. The experimental rock duo made up of primary songwriter, vocalist and guitarist Schmidhauser, and drummer and synthesist Brian Culligan, work with a sense of ceaseless wonder and invention, moving between instruments and technique with fluidity and intuition. But the humble consolation suggested by the band’s name belies what is actually a remarkably uncompromising sound, one given to sudden bursts of raw electric energy and total abstraction. Based, intermittently, between Brooklyn, Providence, and Chicago, the duo has found increasing notoriety for their arresting live performances, which project immersive electronics against muscular, cathartic performance. After years of collaboration in various forms since their initial meeting in 2018, Or Best Offer’s debut album Center arrives as both a document of and extrapolation on their live sound. The album was created and mixed during a period of geographical transition for Schmidhauser, and fittingly, the world of Center has a unique physics and an unstable gravity, as prone to sudden weightlessness as it is brute force. Recorded and produced by the two entirely in Culligan’s Ridgewood bedroom, Center takes a sensitive, loving approach to its materials with both molecular precision and widescreen grandeur. Distorted ribbons of Wurlitzer twirl against...