Review: Relaunch – Recall

I’ve pretty much stopped paying attention to Mistiquemusic these days, with exceptions made for a few reliable acts – including Relaunch, of course. The label has just turned over to new hands so the A&R may improve in the coming months, but right now Mistique will just put out any track their producers give them, and the result is an inundating wall of mediocrity out of which the good stuff struggles to emerge. What started out as a reliable source of quality modern progressive house accelerated into a production-line where the owners just couldn’t say no to anyone.


One of the results of this Mistique-spam is that they release a lot of artist albums that are bloated with too many tracks and not enough artistic decision-making or flow. Albums to Mistique are just a way of hurling yet more music out onto the marketplace, and there’s almost never any point in listening to one of them all the way through. And true enough, Recall pretty much fits the bill – it’s a whopping 14 tracks long, and all of those tracks are full-length club cuts, including three remixes of tracks by other artists and two versions of one track, Portugal. It also includes, oddly, a whole bunch of tracks that have already been released, unaltered in any aspect, including the entire Art Of Ambiance EP and even the Eliptique EP from two years ago on another label. As a result, the album goes on for years, and so much of it didn’t need to be included.


With that said, there is still a lot to enjoy here, if only because Relaunch is a very good producer whose rumbling, momentum-filled progressive works so well on the dancefloor but also has enough wisps of trademark Mistique ambience about it to keep it engaging on the headphones. Most of the best tracks have already been out for some time, including the remix of Aurora that has been long overshadowed by the excellent Airwave remix, and the still-brilliant Art Of Ambiance tracks. My personal favourite is still Blue Room, and not least because I’ve used it in one of my own mixes and heard it out on a dancefloor with bliss-inducing consequences.


Genre: Progressive trance
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 7/10