Music For The Jilted Generation
by The Prodigy

The Prodigy were one of the first acts to manage to bring the music of the underground rave scene into the mainstream, with their debut album seeing 5 top 20 singles in the UK charts. This follow up delivers a harder and more techno oriented take on the breakbeat work from that debut, supposedly in response to the 1994 criminalisation of raves in the UK, although Liam Howlett has since claimed that there was no political intent behind the record. It wasn’t until their third record, Fat Of The Land, that there was much contribution from the other band members, so this is more or less (with Maxim Reality contributing to a single track) a Howlett solo effort. The first thing to note about this record is how good at writing hooks Howlett is. But the way he produces those hooks is what really makes them stand out. They scream, throb and thunder out of the speakers in a way that often feels sonically confrontational while also being inherently engaging. It’s quite the trick. There are some absolute bangers on this album, like Voodoo People and No Good, and there are hooks and sections from pretty much every track that caught my ear and kept me engaged. Something that benefits the music here is that Liam Howlett appears to expend a decent amount of effort trying to avoid the common dance music trap of over-repetition without variation or development. Yes, there is repetition of course, it’s music with one and a half eyes on the dance floor, but he uses long enough sequences, brings in and out different elements regularly enough and throws in enough ear candy to give it almost constant movement, at least during the first half of the record. But he can’t completely avoid those pitfalls. When music is written for rave DJs to mix, it is inherently structured in a longer form way, providing DJs with lengthy intro and outro sections with which to mix. All well and good on the dance floor, but when sitting at home on a Tuesday morning, it does cause things to drag a bit, especially when it results in a 78 minute album. I’m kind of left with that same feeling I had when revisiting Roni Size’s New Forms, when I mentioned that a truncated “album mix” of each track would have resulted in a far stronger overall package. So while there are huge elements of this record that tick every single box, there is enough flab and dragging out of ideas beyond my point of interest that as a whole, it doesn’t quite manage to approach the highest end of the rating scale. It was still dirty, grubby, frantic fun though.