The 2 Bears‘ Follow The Bears EP has, for most of the year, been a shoe in for my EP of 2010 award, with every track featuring heavily in my DJ sets. Just when things looked settled though the follow up, the Curious Nature EP, dropped onto the mat and may have just snuck in stealing the prize on a photo finish.

Basically it’s all about the first song on the EP, Church, a chunky, funky, gospel house number that replaces inane religious pieties with a sublimely secular South East London love story.

Fast becoming one of my favourite songs from the past few years, it matches a kind of blokey everyday boozy sentimentality, with one of the most uplifting yet simple codas you’ll hear this year, and what sounds like a job lot of steel pans Joe Goddard had left over from the making of One Life Stand.

Lets be honest house music has a fairly rubbish track record when it comes to talking about squidgy things like love either opting for fairly bland though uplifting universal platitudes to universal love and peace (see Joe Smooth etc etc), or reducing it to the level of a three minute bikini clad bouncy bouncy wankfest.

With Church The 2 Bears have brought it back down to the personal, and in turn made a record that speaks to anyone who has ever really fallen head over heels in love should understand.

Not sure how much of that will be picked up by packed rooms full of gurning drug mules but anyway the rest of the EP serves up more traditional heads down proper housey business so there’s somethign for everyone, including an ace Kraftwerk-esque cover of Fun Boy Three’s The Lunatics (have Taken Over The Asylum).

The Curious Nature EP is out on Southern Fried next week, in the meantime Care Bear Stare at the video to Church up above and check out the whole EP below.

The 2 Bears: Curious Nature EP by Southern Fried Records

To find out if Joe and Raf really are smarter than the average bear check this little interview with them from earlier in the year.