Music For The Jilted Generation, despite commercial success, was a harsh underground rave statement proving that Essex rave auteur Liam Howlett could transcend the novelty acid house of many of his peers. Fat Of The Land, however, showed a very different side to The Prodigy; the exaggerated punk pastiche of "Firestarter" and "Breathe", with vocals provided by the band's cartoon ...
Manufacturer: Xl
Crawling out of the end of the rave scene, the Prodigy's second album went straight in at number one in the charts. All the tracks have the unique stamp of Liam Howlett and the boys, from the hypnotic atmosphere of aggression and attitude on "Poison" and "Voodoo People" to the guitar-driven "Their Law" (featuring the now defunct Pop Will Eat Itself) and the breakbeat tech-house of "No Good (Start ...
To remain relevant after a decade in the music industry is rare indeed; for a dance act, it's virtually unique. Singles 93-03 ably demonstrates how the Chemical Brothers have managed it. Having first carved a reputation as DJs the Dust Brothers in the early 1990s, the two home-counties history graduates narrowly avoided calling themselves the London Dust Explosion before spearheading big ...
Manufacturer: Virgin
Before music journalists were throwing around terms like "drum & bass" or jungle, the Prodigy's Liam Howlett was creating high-energy dance music by marrying sampled, pitch-shifted beats to all manner of electronic timbres. This album has it all: complicated break beats, housey piano riffs, lush analog pads, frenetic and computeresque melodies, and subsonic bass. In fact, the mélange is so dense ...
When Danny DeVito commissioned Irish producer David Holmes to provide the score for the film Out of Sight, he chose wisely. Holmes's gritty, urban dance music, first exposed on the sadly underrated The Film's Crap Let's Slash the Seats, is perfect for evoking scenes and atmospheres, yet it's interesting enough to stand on its own. For this album, Holmes and a friend wandered the ...
Manufacturer: Universal / Island
Biographers of Norman Cook should look no further than the title of this--his second album under the pseudonym Fatboy Slim. From humble beginnings as the bass player in prole rock band The Housemartins, through chart-topping fame with Beats International, and even a spell scraping a meagre living from writing computer game soundtracks in the early 90s, Norman Cook has done it all. You've ...
Manufacturer: Skint
The Chemical Brothers released their third album with their status as one of the UK's most exciting bands unassailable. Surrender, managed to enhance their already burgeoning reputation, drawing on the talents of a formidable array of celebrity collaborators including Missy Elliott, Oasis' Noel Gallagher and Bernard Sumner. The Brothers shifted their attention away from hip-hop breaks ...
A key record of the 1990s, Exit Planet Dust invented the big-beat style that dominated British dance music in the second half of the decade, and it still sounds superb in its own right. Skull-crunching hip-hop loops, fuzz guitar, insistently repetitive spoken samples and thunderous basslines make up the blueprint for one of the most instantly energising albums ever recorded. Many of the ...
To follow up their bombastic 1995 album Exit Planet Dust, the Chemical Brothers fine-tuned their bombastic beats and produced a rock-solid pop album (pun intended). Dig Your Own Hole finds the common ground between rock & roll and techno, both in spirit and substance. Singles like "Block Rockin' Beats," "Elektrobank," and "Setting Sun" (featuring vocals by Oasis's Noel Gallagher) may ...
If anyone's suffering from new-year blues, Come With Us will shake them out of their narcolepsy. This fantastic album roars out of the starting blocks like a supercharged dragster, blowing up a heady fume of hip-hop techno flavoured with the Chemical's new found post-rave happiness. Their fourth album shows all the passion of their earlier works coupled with a sophistication beyond the mere ...
