BnB Review: Isolée - Well Spent Youth

Written by Youri Jozee

House/Techno -

Six years after his last album, Isolée returns with the long awaited follow up Well Spent Youth on DJ Koze’s Pampa label. Here’s the full analysis.

Over the past fifteen years, Isolée (Rajko Mueller) has grown out to become one of the key figures in emotive, touching house and techno. His 1998 hit Beau Mot Plage, still considered a highlight in the genre, was soon followed up with remixes for Tiga, Alter Ego, Franz Ferdinand, Recloose and many more, as well as the critically acclaimed Rest and We Are Monster on the Playhouse label.

Well Spent Youth reflects Isolée’s trademarked sound yet in an updated form: Gloomy patterns, soft synth strokes and mid-tempo beats are the basis of this slightly psychedelic sounding album, but there’s much room for experiments too, which mostly appear in the form of offbeat tunes packed with abstract fx. Opening track Paloma Triste is a perfect example of Isolée’s adventurous mind: this slow-paced thumper combined warm pads to stinging electro bass and guitar strokes, while the track as a whole sounds very druggy. Tunes such as the magnificent Thirteen Times An Hour (a punchy house track with a truckload of amazing fx and layers), and One Box are typical Isolée house tunes built around sweaty grooves and hypnotizing patterns, while the dubby and very abstract Trop Près De Toi (’97 Interlude) is another example of one of the album’s more experimental tracks and an absolute highlight.  

Our verdict
Well Spent Youth has become an album on which Isolée once again demonstrates what he’s capable of: creating warm, captivating electronic music. The album is by far his most experimental and diverse to date, switching from pure house to more unconventional mutations of dubby fx and unexpected twists. This makes the album a rather trippy affair at some points, and a very intriguing one as a whole. Well Spent Youth has become everything we hoped it would be.

Stand out tracks: Thirteen Times An Hour, Trop Près De Toi (’97 Interlude).
Weak moments: none worth mentioning.

Rating: 8.0/10
Label: Pampa
Release date: Out now