Experience/expanded (reissue)
Xl Recordings
DANCE
Few artists or bands managed to release epoch-defining albums. To each scene there arethe chosen few long players that have taken their place in the canon of records that changed the shape of popular culture. Psychedelia has Sgt Pepper’s…, punk has Never Mind the Bollocks…, trip hop has Blue Lines… The list is endless with each scene, each genre andevery subgenre declaring key albums as defining moments. But only a small handful actually make it onto these lists… Like I said, very few artists or bands manage to release epoch-defining albums. And even fewer manage two.
Welcome (back) to The Prodigy, who have released more than their share of essential, era-defining albums. None more so then these two albums; ‘The Prodigy Experience’ and ‘Musicfor the Jilted Generation’ – each a perfect summary of their time, each a signpost to bravenew futures.
1992 Britain. The free party movement had evolved into the spectacular turbo-driven ravescene. The media had turned weekend enjoyment into full-blown moral panic while thepolice seemed to devote much of their overtime to chasing down these folk devil ravers.Huge events drew like-minded souls from everywhere with the promise of hedonistic pleasure and the sense of enlightened positivity gained from a heady mix of good pills anddancing all night to pounding, furious breaks-driven hardcore. The air was filled with a senseof victory. In the war of the raves, it was the ravers who seemed to be winning. And The Prodigy were there, soundtracking the battles, scoring the victories and capturing the allround joi de vivre with their brilliantly energised singles.
It was into these defiantly grinning times that The Prodigy unleashed their debut album ‘TheProdigy Experience’ In late November ’92 and it immediately flew in the face of that overused idiom, ‘dance bands can’t make good albums’. In ‘Experience’, Liam Howlett and cosucceeded in combining the energy of the rave with stunning and timeless productiondepths. “I remember I had this idea of doing like a rave concept album”, says Liam “but inthe end I thought it was too restricting. What I wanted was a full experience, you know likeyou get with one of the early Pink Floyd albums. Something for every mood but stillobviously from the rave scene.” Tothe Prodigy fans most of the album came as no shock, featuring as it did versions of all of their top 5 singles to date, alongside other live faves from the band’s already incendiary shows.
The singles appear in brilliantly reworked versions. ‘Charly’ has all but the slightest hint ofthe cartoon cat eliminated, in its place sits an adrenalised hard and dark, cut up breaksversion sub-titled ‘Trip into Drum and Bass Version’. While some two years later the mediawould grapple with the notion that drum’n’bass was the new version of jungle, The Prodigy had been describing the subterranean sound thus since November 1992.
Elsewhere, ‘Everybody In The Place’ takes on a fresher, more vital air about it while ‘G-Force’ is all but transformed into a full on hyper speed anthem going under the name ‘Hyperspeed-G-Force Pt 2’. ‘Out of Space’ (the single that followed the album) presents a rough neckskanking groove with a lift from Max Romeo’s classic ‘Chase the Devil’.
If proof was needed of The Prodigy mainman Liam Howlett’s true potential it lay in the album’s finest moment ‘Weather Report’, an almost psychedelic episode that opens with alow drone and weather forecasts before emerging into a grandiose, yet somber string-ledrefrain. The track then collapsed into a series of abstract noises before launching adowntempo breakbeat that carried the vibe towards it’s huge, thundering climax; completewith the full on acid madness of a rampant 303 squelching with the intensity of a lightningbolt. A brilliant track that was to give a huge hint as to the future of The Prodigy. A far morecomplex and assured sound that was moving in completely different direction to route therave scene was disappearing down.
‘Experience’ entered the charts at number 12, selling over 200,000 copies over the followingweeks. As a result The Prodigy not only successfully managed to move into the territory ofthe serious, long-term artist (until that point dominated by the rock scene) but also managed to completely sidestep the fact that the days of the rave were coming to an end.
This, of course, was Howlett’s intention. It was as much a statement of the band’s future asit was a summing up of the rave era. In every inch of the album Howlett was playing with preconceptions of what this scene’s music should sound like, what the scene actually was and how it should be represented. Indeed, even the album artwork challenged the stereotyped computer-generated, multi-coloured images of the era. It’s plain black and white cover opened up to present had drawn cartoon images of the band members - fashioned by future author of The Beach, Alex Garland. Coming as 'Experience' did at a time when dance artists simply didn’t release albums Liam Howlett had nothing from the contemporary scene to use as a standard. As a result he set his own standards, somethingthat would remain a feature of his work.
Released here with an extra disc of raretracks, mixes and live versions (including ‘Android’ from the very first Prodigy single, originally drawn from the demo Liam had sent to XL), this all new expanded Experience offers the definitive version of the rave era’s greatest album.
MARTIN JAMES 2008
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MP3 ALBUM |
#XLCD266 |
$16.99 |
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DOUBLE CD |
XLCD266 |
$24.95 |
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MP3 (320k) Individuals AU$1.69 per track
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