You remember The Prodigy, don’t you? Insane, hypoid-dancing punk-rock drawf, bombshell beats, curiously belligerent attitude to the press, contentious pseudo-masochistic misogyny in tow? Firestarter? Erupting egos? Sudden departure of dwarf? Thought you did. Well this time they’re back.: leaner, tighter, brighter but every bit as nasty as before. And for those who thought the ill-advised 2002 comeback single ‘Baby’s Got A Temper’ all but doused their mighty electro- punk flame, be heartily reassured that all those dirty, sleazy, crazy nasty beats are back. It might not quite be the ‘Fat Of The Land’ revisited – but the same razor-sharp pulse that split hairs on this album and it’s immediate predecessor, ‘Poison’ (1995) continues to flow on here. In fact, Prodigy founder Liam Howlett has not only yanked The Prodigy back from the brink of obscurity and inconsequence, he’s punched them squarely back into the jaws of big time contemporary electronica. Just as The Prodigy threatened to join the growing cast of former icons of angry like Oasis and John Lydon and were resigning themselves to spending the remainder of their shelf life on the fringes of celebrity revival – Howlett produces something as prodigious and as vital as anything he produced at the start of his career.
Written almost exclusively on his laptop, ‘Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned’ has the sturdy coherence and sense of purpose that can only be derived from this kind of control. With more than a years worth of material scrapped, Howlett was able to lock the doors of his bedroom and just get on with punching new ideas into shape. Old-skool purists might balk at the thought of the laptop as a legitimate, beat-busting tool, but name us one other method that affords the same degree of spontaneity and freedom? The guitar? Okay, but can you watch DVDs on it? Thought not.
Using voices like samples ‘Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned’ Howlett cuts and pastes his way through a rough and extreme set of A (and B)list characters, with vocal contributions from Juliette Lewis on the fidgety pop and retro espionage of the acid-helium hybrid ‘Hot Ride’, Kooth Keith on the cranky and ripped-to-shreds ‘Wake Up Call’ (featuring some wicked flutes) Oasis slugger Liam Gallagher on ‘Shootdown’ (perhaps not the brightest star in this firmament – but pretty peachy in a crazy Chemical Brothers, pressure-cooker kind of way – and the recurring intro motif is a beaut’) and, lest we forget, Twista on ‘Get Up On Off’. ‘Girls’ out jaxxes the Jaxx and ‘Action Radar’ shows electro-clash a thing or two about purpose.
As an exercise is damage limitation it works marvellously well. As an exercise in the pure velocity of sound, it’s even better. Looking for brighter whites on your dreary old acid-house? Get a load of this….
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