Isolee: 'Well Spent Youth'

A review I wrote for FACT magazine. View the original here.

Dance albums are strange beasts. Producers often walk a tightrope between stringing together a chain of recognisable, club-friendly anthems and taking advantage of the artistic scope that the format offers. One man who has succeeded at this balancing act twice is Rajko Müller, a.k.a Isolee, the German producer who had a devastating impact on the house scene with ‘Beau Mot Plage’, a heady cocktail of francophile guitars and featherweight synths that still sounds as exotic and seductive today as it did thirteen years ago. He followed it up with the seminal Rest in 2000, and his second long-player We Are Monster, certified his reputation in Europe’s house and techno scenes, while garnering him fans from outside that sphere.

In the seven years since We Are Monster‘s release, Müller has only offered us one compilation and a handful of EPs, varying in quality from the nu-disco delight of ‘Albacares’ to the limp ‘October Nightingale’. Set against this backdrop it’s hardly surprising that news of a new album on DJ Koze’s fledgling Pampa records has been received with a mixture of rapturous anticipation and apprehension by fans.

With such a weighty legacy preceding it, there’s always a risk that the final product will crumble under the weight of expectation, but any fears of a rapid departure from the Isolee sound are soon dispelled. Opener ‘Paloma Triste’ acts as confident statement of intent, a chamber of gently reverberating synths that’s gatecrashed by bursts of willfully out-of-tune funk bass. It’s this element of the unexpected that makes Well Spent Youth so intriguing, and there’s no shortage of ideas on display here. Each track begins with a set of ingredients and then gently stirs them into new and unpredictable shapes, evoking the sense of an audio stream of consciousness. The results range across tempos, from the twisted sawtooth waves and analogue bleeps of ‘Going Nowhere’ to the reassuringly populist ‘Thirteen Times An Hour’ and ‘Journey’s End’, which revert to more familiar territory with their solid deep house grooves. Echoes of Isolee’s previous work can be clearly heard at times, most noticeably on ‘Trop Pres De Toi (’97 interlude)’, which recalls We Are Monster’s ‘Jelly Baby’ with its vocal sample looped into meaninglessness, but the album is never simply a lesson in retrospection.

Despite the producer’s insistence to the contrary, Well Spent Youth seems more geared to the solitary appreciation of the headphones than the communal experience of the dancefloor, and the best tracks on offer create a space between your ears where Müller is free to experiment with conventions and our expectations. The jarring Kraftwek pastiche of ‘Transmission’ aside, each tune more than lives up to Isolee’s reputation for constructing genuinely inspiring electronic music, and the album has a sonic depth that the listener is able to immerse themselves in. If there’s one criticism, it’s that there is none of the instant gratification of – or indeed, nothing quite as memorable as – ‘Beau Mot Plage’ or We Are Monster‘s addictive ‘Schrapnell’. Once the album is off it’s soon out of mind, but with an LP that so clearly merits repeat listens, that hardly seems to be a problem.