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The punkest single of 1996 wasn't by Green Day, or Rancid, or any of the other snotty US bands making a killing reheating the sound of the Buzzcocks and UK Subs for the American suburbs. In fact, it came from a quite unlikely source: The Prodigy, a UK rave outfit helmed by the young Liam Howlett who, following the Criminal Justice Act legislation that turned blissed-out ravers into lawbreakers, decided to channel his music in a quite different, anti-establishment direction. Firestarter, a demented burst of punk-rave with a video featuring dancer-turned-singer Keith Flint, dyed hair spiked up like a pair of devil horns, going mental in a sewer, made The Prodigy – already a pretty big deal following 1994's chart-topping Music For The Jilted Generation – into household names.
It would take 15 months for the Prodigy to follow up Firestarter with a full album, but by the time it arrived, they had reinvented themselves almost entirely. The hi-octane techno beats of yesteryear take a back seat to heavier, slower hip-hop influenced numbers like Mindfields and Diesel Power, the latter featuring a rap from former Ultramagnetic MC Kool Keith. The rave-speed tracks like Funky Shit and controversy-baiting Smack My Bitch Up, meanwhile, simmer with negative energy, utterly divested of the loved-up vibe that dominated dancefloors mere years before. Throughout, Flint and fellow MC Maxim play the role of demented ringmasters, barking cartoonishly grotesque rhymes, and there's space for a couple of guest spots as well. Kula Shaker's Crispian Mills might just have turned out his finest moment on the nine-minute Narayan, exhorting cod-mystically about ''the western sun'' over slamming breakbeats (not sure about the Buddhist chant interlude, mind). And things climax with a hell-for-leather cover of L7's Fuel My Fire that grafts seething, Generation X rage into a sleek techno engine and hands the keys over to the joyriders.
Heavy enough to appeal to the rock kids but remaining a dance album to the core, Fat Of The Land was almost single-handedly responsible for breaking electronica in the US. The Prodigy would never better it, but then, it's hard to know how they could.
Louis PattisonBBC The BBC's album reviews ended in 2013, although the pages are archived for retrospective reading.
bbc.co.uk |
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