prodigy
THE FAT OF THE LAND
reviewed by bolty

The Fat Of the Land ("fotl" from now on) is the prodigy's long awaited 3rd album, following Experience in '92 and Music For The Jilted Generation in '94. Being a bit of a fan myself, I bought the album at 0:13 on the release date, after joining the queue the day before (half an hour earlier). I got a free poster of a crab for my efforts. Cheers Mr Virgin Megastore Blokes!

The first disappointment was that the album contains a paltry 10 tracks, lasting only 56 minutes, and two of the tracks are Firestarter and Breathe, which were both released last year on single. Boohoo.

So lets have a butchers of the cover on the way home. Well, its a crab all right. Not sure on the significance, but it seems to fit into their nasty animal theme, what with ants, crocodiles, cockroaches etc. Inside the cover there are some very cool looking scratchy, metallic graphics, with a few words on each page: "Steel?" "We have no butter," "but I ask you" "Would you rather have butter or guns?" "Shall we import lard or steel?" "Let me tell you" "preparedness makes us powerful." "Butter merely makes us fat." "Lard?" Work it out for yourself. The middle pages have a groovy characature of the band which opens out to show the credits, and some ant photos.

Right, get home, run upstairs, slap in the cd, press play, and... yes! The first track, "Smack My Bitch Up" certainly doesn't disappoint. Its in a similar style to Firestarter/Breathe, a sort of punky/funky/breakbeat. With the booming bass line and the relentless "SMACK my BITCH up, SMACK my BITCH up" vocals, this track is awesome. Unfortunately it won't be released on single coz of the naughty words :(

Skip track two, its just Breathe, heard it a million times before (it is good though). The third track "Diesel Power" is another goodun, and partly to blame for the CD design, which contains no writing/title as with all recent prodigy CDs, but just a big rusting "A" logo (taken from the grille of a Seddon Atkinson truck (boring fact #368)) Doesn't look as good as the Breathe CD's goldfish bowl (but then that is the coolest CD design ever :) Anyway the track itself is in the usual prodigy style, with unintelligible rap vocals by some dodgy American bloke called "Kool Keith" (Not to be confused with Keith Flint, the mad bloke in the Prodigy)

Right No.4, "Funky Shit" is a bit poo. It just has some woman going "Oh my god, that's some funky shit" With a slow, ravy-ish, repetitive backing, which sounds like the kind of mod file you would immediately dump in the recycle bin. But it sounds quite good in the advert for the new film "Event Horizon".

"Serial Thrilla" is next and is tipped to be the next single. This is virtually an out and out heavy metal track. There's hardly any hint of the prodigy's dance/breakbeat roots here. I just hope their music doesn't go down this path in the future. Its not bad, but its a tad unoriginal, and not my cup of tea.

Track 6 is a relief. "Mindfields" is another stonker, similar to "Smack My Bitch Up". The main gist of the lyrics is "This is dangerous. Open up your head, feel the shell shock" Cool bass, cool tune, cool breakbeats and nice aggressive lyrics.

This one has something to do with Kula Shaker. Arrrrrgh! Luckily though "Narayan" is pretty good. Reminds me a bit of "Setting Sun", by the Chemical Brothers. It has similar indie sounding lyrics, and quite a laid back, trippy feeling to it, especially when the weird chanting kicks in at the end. "oooooooooh-aaaaaaaaaah-naaa-naaaaaaaaraaaaaayaaaaan" Hmmm.

Probably still the best track on the album, Firestarter is next. The first new song after Jilted, firestarter took the Prodigy in a new direction; original, punky, breakbeaty, plenty of bass, plenty of Keith. Firestarter is good it is! But after hearing it for the 500th time, it gets a bit tedious.

"Climbatize" is the only instrumental on the album. It is a fairly laid back track, with a cool 70s sounding synth sound. Pretty good.

The last track, "Fuel My Fire" is not even written by Liam (the main prodigy dude) Its just some poo heavy metal sounding track. It just sounds like a generic rock track, there's nothing new or interesting here. Bit disappointed to hear the prodigy churning out this stuff.

Right, so there we go, a good album, but I feel it could have been better. If you're not a big fan to start with and you don't have the singles then it'll probably appeal to you a lot more, but the die-hard fan might be a tad disappointed, but then you'll buy it any way.


More News...

Well FOTL is still top of the Album Charts after a zillion weeks


FOTL has been nominated for the Mercury Music prize, but if you ask me "Dig Your Own Hole" by the Chemical Brothers should win, it's awesome! As long as its not Spice by the Spice Girls...


Liam has said he's never gonna make another album, coz he's under too much pressure. Poor bloke, it must be so stressful raking in all that cash. I think he made a similar whinge after releasing Jilted. If you ask me, it was just said to grab a few headlines and keep the album at number 1.


And Some Pages From Teletext..


Liam Howlett of the Prodigy has turned down the chance to produce Madonna.

Prodigy are signed to Madonna's label Maverick in the States, but Liam was wary of the star appropriating his techno tricks on her next album.

Says Liam: "I'm quite flattered but I'm not doing it. Giving Madonna my sound is possibly the worst move we could make right now. I don't want to be spreading my sound around. I'm not prepared to take that risk."


Prodigy frontman Keith Flint stars on the current cover of prestigious American music magazine Rolling Stone, but he's far from happy.

The band had insisted that all four members should appear in the cover shot - yet the publication went ahead and printed a solo image of Keith.

"The band feel cheated and lied to and taken advantage of," says a Prodigy publicist.


After two months on the road and a tour dominated by British bands, The Prodigy are headlining the final stages of US travelling festival Lollapalooza '97.

The Prodigy played at the biggest venue yet for Lollapalooza '97 at the weekend - a gig at a huge amphitheatre in California.

One fan at the gig described the band's act as "a bombardment of sounds - you could feel the bass, piercing through your chest ¯ it was pretty incredible."


More Info...

Finaly, the official Prodigy website can be found here: www.prodigy.co.uk. It's actually quite a good site, including the latest news, chat pages, and the Breathe and Firestarter videos for download.