“Intentions are to deliver the new album shortly after the New Year. “Recording of the album started about four months ago,” frontman Liam Howlett says in a statement. It had been rumored that the album could be released earlier, possibly even this year. It's the most elaborate invitation to sod off you'll hear for some time.Electronica act the Prodigy is finally starting to firm up information about its long-awaited follow-up to 1997’s “The Fat of the Land.” A spokesperson confirms the tentatively titled “Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned” is now due for release in spring/summer 2004. It is anti-dance in some ways while being trammelled by the same reliance on programming as the rest of the genre, but also anti-pop and anti-pretty much everything else. 'Medusa's Path' is a lovely workout using a snatch of music from Iranian Gholam Hossein, but this and two other highlights - 'Phoenix', which is a bootleg of Shocking Blue's track 'Lovebuzz', and 'The Way It Is', taking the bass line from Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' on a souped-up ride through the Eighties - prove another point: they are borrowings.Īlways Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, for all its laptop use and Howlett's decades of programming nous, feels very retro, using samples in their naked form and abandoning the studio-based, 12-bar song structure he broke with 'Firestarter'. The last number, 'Shoot Down', with Gallagher's distinctive, shouty, contribution, warms up just as it ends - dead - as if cocking a final snook. But it doesn't really feel like a song more a bass-led ear assault. The latter has a really good breakdown where Lewis is backed by just a low snare and a hairy caterpillar of a synth line (a lot of those here, too). It takes until 'Get Up Get Off', with Twista's three verses of rap, and 'Hotride', which features a sassy, trashy performance from Juliette Lewis, before you feel as though you've heard anything resembling more than a programming-led workout. Princess Superstar fares less well on 'Memphis Bells', her effort reduced to a couple of lines repeated ad nauseam. Things get no better with the single 'Girls', and where Ping Pong Bitches' rapped vocals acquire a bit of melody later on, the track is beset by Eighties synths and big, nasty acid noises (plenty of those on this album - really animal acid noises). There is also a familiarly Eastern-sounding female vocal motif (a common device in Howlett's music), but the main vocal, cut into two short lines without variations, is a raucous, overdriven male scream, dogged by Stuka-diving synth lines. True, it begins pleasantly enough, with a slow, grinding breakbeat, funky with irregular kicks. Opener 'Spitfire' makes the point by doing just what its title suggests. What he's ended up with is something more extreme and less accessible than Fat of the Land. Vocalists Keith Flint and Maxim Reality have also been put to one side as Howlett has withdrawn to produce his ideas alone on a laptop, selecting a handful of other singers, from Liam Gallagher to near-unknowns such as Dirt Candy's Paul Jackson, to use as samples.
True, he has made a departure of sorts again, scrapping a whole host of ideas produced using his old method after the failure of the single, 'Baby's Got a Temper' in 2002, and going back to basics. Whether he will do the same this time remains to be seen.
Liam Howlett had mixed up the masterplan of dance, topped and tailed it into a curt number one and won huge praise and sales in the process. We relented after three or four listens the track was a groundbreaker, a benchmark, a canny translation of punk and blues into the dance idiom, far more revolutionary than anything aboard the chugging tugboat of house. The song seemed trivial and badly produced. What the hell was this? How could you pass it off as decent music? Where was the bass line, the kick drum? But for that last question, we were just like an old couple in Fifties America hearing rock'n'roll for the first time. We turned to each other in utter bemusement, even contempt. I was fairly deeply immersed in house music at the time and travelling back from a night in Newquay with a bandmate. I remember when I first heard 'Firestarter' back in 1995.