Review: The Prodigy - Invaders Must Die

The Prodigy's latest release Invaders Must Die, is a particularly hard album for me to write about because, unlike most albums I've listened to, I didn't really form an impression about it on first listen. In other words, I didn't know if it was good or not.

To me, The Prodigy have always been a group of relatively likeable hooligans that jump around confessing their crimes of arson and domestic violence while breathing. Beyond that experience though, how they became the best-selling dance outfit of all time is a mystery to me. It just seemed to me that these big beat Brits haven't put out many decent tunes beyond the ones on their third outing, The Fat of the Land.


That is, until I heard the title track for Invaders Must Die. Oddly enough, I discovered both the song and the music video for this track when I woke up one morning to find it sitting on my Xbox 360 after a night of heavy drinking. To the best of my recollection, I didn't put it there (but I must've), so I decided to give it a listen and suddenly got pretty excited about the idea of a new Prodigy album dropping. While the track doesn't really sound like The Prodigy proper, it made perhaps the best use of nu-rave, Hadouken!-esque keyboards that I have heard while also jumping on the electro-meets-rock bandwagon that relative newcomers Digitalism and Justice have been riding in recent years. In fact, had I heard "Invaders Must Die" on the radio, I probably would have had no idea it was them if it wasn't for the robotic voice that reminds you a couple times throughout the song that they are, in fact, The Prodigy. Needless to say, I grew very fond of the track, and really hoped that the rest of the album would be as good.

From here though, I was pretty neutral about the album until I listened to it a few more times. The rest of the tracks largely make use of the nu-rave keys, lots of drums and some nonsense lyrics emanating from the psychotic Keith Flint (and, occasionally, the slightly less crazy Maxim Reality) as per usual for The Prodigy. But, after a few more listens, all of these tracks seemed to become flat and, quite frankly, annoying. A couple tracks in particular ("Run With the Wolves" and "Stand Up") possess drum tracks played by Dave Grohl of Nirvana and Foo Fighters fame, meaning the beats in these songs should be something special, right? Turns out that no, Grohl was brought on to play drums on these tracks for no good reason.

It just seems that, for the most part, The Prodigy just put out all their good material on one disc back in 1997, and have been suffering ever since. Do yourself a favor and just buy The Fat of the Land again if you feel the urge to purchase Prodigy album. It's kind of odd to think that I kind of enjoyed listening to some tracks on Invaders Must Die like "Omen" and "Take Me to the Hospital," especially since the amount of irritation they cause to my ears now is almost indescribable.