Not the greatest Prodigy experience! (Experience - The Prodigy)

Member Name: DanielKemp

Product:	Experience - The Prodigy
Date:	12/06/09 (30 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Pure electronica, makes you want to move your feet

Disadvantages: The album sounds VERY dated, some of the tracks have superior single counterparts

The Prodigy - Experience (1992)

Producer: Liam Howlett

Jericho
Music Reach (1/2/3/4)
Wind it Up
Your Love (Remix)
Hyperspeed (G-Force Part 2)
Charly (Trip into Drum and Bass version)
Out of Space
Everybody in the Place (155 and Rising)
Weather Experience
Fire (Sunrise Version)
Ruff in the Jungle Bizness
Death of the Prodigy Dancers (Live)

The Prodigy has always been Liam Howlett and several cling-ons. Howlett is the driving force behind the band and from this debut onwards it has been made blatantly clear who is in charge of the creativity. While many people probably associate Keith and Maxim with the visual side of the band (what about Leroy?), The prodigy has always been about Liam Howlett's inability to grow up and his love of sampling and demoing tracks, something which has been instilled from an early age.

Jericho is as thrilling as rave music gets. It is persistent in its onslaught and temptation to make you get up and move your feet. It is nigh on impossible to sit still while Jericho plays and it is well placed as the first track on the album. It was released as the third single from Experience (together with Fire).

I can quite easily see that Wind it Up was a cutting edge recording at the time of release, but today it sounds dated, less than enigmatic and a cliché of the 1990's dance scene. It's still good fun, I won't deny it that, but in 2009 it just sounds so sad and old. Now, where are my glow sticks?

Hyperspeed starts off with a vocal sample from Kate Bush's Hounds of Love, of all things, and then quickly turns it up to 11 and produces one of the best moments on the album. Subtle it aint, but it seems to have the sole concern of giving you a good time and it does just so. I couldn't tell you what the female vocal sample is saying, but it sounds like, "Hitler! Hitler! Hitler!" And as that man did, this too could have started a revolution (but hopefully a more positive one)!

One of the biggest problems with Experience is that it started one of the most worrying trends with The Prodigy, in that songs from their albums were usually far inferior to their single counterparts. The biggest case in point is Charly, which sounds incredibly poor when compared to the single version which had been released more than a year earlier. It sounds like nothing more than an unreleased Howlett demo and it pains me to say that it should have stayed put as just that.

Everybody in the Place suffers from the same problems that Charly does. Remember how fresh and exciting the single sounded? Well forget it buddy, you aren't getting any of that here. The sketchy bongo percussion loop which comes in at 15 seconds makes me laugh every time without fail. The whole thing is just a mess and is poorly constructed from the ground up.

Thankfully Out of Space still holds up OK. It almost has an air of Phil Spector's iconic wall of sound about it, but obviously translated into the realms of electronica with a whole platoon of unremitting beeps going on. The reggae vocal sample from Max Romeo's I Chase the Devil is brilliant, "I'm gonna send him to outer space to find another race." It also samples the lyric, "Pay close attention, I'll take your brain to another dimension", from the Ultramagnetic MCs.

Weather Experience is my favourite track on the album. Lasting over 8 minutes it is everything I could wish for and more, but surely the best news is that it is one of the tracks which has stood the test of time. A resolutely determined recording, it makes the transition from slow atmospherics to an onslaught of hardcore dance arrangements. Even if parts of the album are a write off, Howlett can be happy with this recording.

If it was up to me the album would end with the song Fire. It's a truly stirring big beat anthem with more feel good vibes than Bob Marley smoking 10 pounds of marijuana in your living room. The repetitious piano/keyboard loop provides the song's main hook and things just get better from there on in. The vocal sample is from The Crazy World of Arthur Brown's legendary 1968 single, Fire.

The final two tracks, Ruff in the Jungle Bizness and Death of the Prodigy Dancers, do nothing for me at all. They sound even more exhausted than the few haphazard remixes of early Prodigy singles. It probably seems worse than it is because they are placed as the final tracks on the album, so you go away remembering them and not Weather Experience and Fire. But the Prodigy would learn how to sequence their albums later on.

Experience is a good example of unadulterated electronica, but Liam Howlett's extravagant beats rarely push the boundaries and are reluctant to attempt anything new. Its primary flaw is its age - the album now sounds chronically dated in places. While technology used to record music in other genres generally stays the same (a guitar will always be a guitar), electronic equipment is always coming on in leaps and bounds, so it isn't really a true fault of the album, but rather that Experience is just a product of the era it was recorded in.

In short, it isn't horrible, but The Prodigy can do better.

6.5/10

Daniel Kemp

Read more reviews at www.danielkempreviews.co.uk

Summary: Not the definitive Prodigy experience!