Needs some more… something.
[Video]
[5.38]
Thomas Inskeep: Liam Howlett and his band of merry men act like big beat never went away, and why not? Even with a brief Loleatta Holloway sample, this is pure aggression. There’s a time and place for that, and between Brexit and Trump, I see no reason that said time and place isn’t right now.
[8]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Loleatta Holloway gets sampled a lot — we covered a song last month that did just that — but doing so is always a double-edged sword. Case in point: “Need Some1,” a track that samples “Crash Goes Love.” It’s hard not to feel like there’s more energy packed in Holloway’s vocal track than anything The Prodigy are doing with the instrumentation here. Why remind listeners of your relative lack of talent?
[2]
Tim de Reuse: Punchier mix aside, this wouldn’t have hiked any eyebrows had it come out a month after The Fat of the Land. That’s by design, of course; The Prodigy’s entire identity is “the band that made ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ in 1997,” and everything they’ve released in the 21st century is “music for people who still remember ‘Smack My Bitch Up.'” On that particular level, I guess they’ve succeeded. Beyond that level — well, I didn’t think “Smack My Bitch Up” was a particular masterpiece of late-nineties big beat, and I’m lukewarm on this as well.
[5]
John Seroff: As a dude who bought Experience from my local Tower Records back in ’93, I can tell you that a large part of The Prodigy’s appeal was the band’s willingness to cherry-pick genre-blind samples, a knack for adrenaline-soaked speed, and a penchant for skittering batshittery. Twenty-five years later, what once seemed outré has become de rigueur and they’re being shown up on all points by a Sanrio-sponsored YouTube sensation. The try-hard, tweaker’s delight music video and a pair of full listens to their mostly all right new album support my suspicion that The Prodigy’s Jilted Generation big beat transgressions have integrated so fully into modern millennial musical taste that they currently register as slightly aggressive wallpaper. I look forward to 2043, when Death Grips, god willing, should sound “quaint.”
[5]
Micha Cavaseno: Ugh, 2004 Me wants so badly to have this on the soundtrack of some PS2 game I randomly recollect during odd hours of the day when I’m trying to think about anything but the reality of my life. As a soundtrack for anything in 2018, I don’t know how much utility it might possess, but make no mistake: The track bangs, and it would’ve banged so much harder in ’04.
[4]
Crystal Leww: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idealized version of a nightclub when I was a kid who had never visited a nightclub. I think Output in Brooklyn is what my tiny little brain thought a nightclub was like, based on what I saw in movies and TV shows. In my baby mind, nightclubs sounded exactly like The Prodigy. This was based on every single movie when I was a kid where young Londoners were partying and behaving badly or every single scene where the international spy has to find the bad guy who ran into the night club to escape the crowd. “Need Some1” is over a decade older than The Fat of the Land, and The Prodigy still sound like they know exactly what they want to sound like. I am old enough to go to nightclubs now and I would thrilled if I heard this aesthetic out — so specific, so sure of itself, so committed to its own schtick. I can practically see the movie scene as this is playing out.
[7]
Ian Mathers: The end of the year is, by an order of magnitude or two, the most stressful time at my day job, and this Monday morning about four different things I’d been dreaded happened at once and so naturally I decided to cope by trying to deal with them all at once (because focusing on any one of them made it feel like the other three were on fire). You might think that the overtly abrasive, hectoring, aggressive structure and timbre of something like “Need Some1” would make my panic worse, but having it looping while I did the workplace equivalent of thrashing around chaotically until I finally managed to order things in some way actually, probably prevented me from needing to go curl into a ball on the first aid room cot. Who knows how often I’ll listen to it in January (plenty of music I’d argue for it’s for all the time, of course), but right now I’ll take every bit of that part where they just play the same note a dozen times like a finger jabbing into your chest you’ll give me. Ruthlessly efficient, which means I’d imagine when it misses for someone it’s gonna miss big. Plus one extra point for my visceral enjoyment of this particular fuzziness in the digital distortion.
[9]
Taylor Alatorre: You can’t just add a breakbeat to a home security alarm and call it a complete song, guys. Sorry.
[3]