Still techno's Sex Pistols: The Prodigy return, tasteless as ever

In 1997, naysayers gleefully watched as the rave era of the early ’90s seemed to collapse. Rave, and all its unsavory accoutrements — from drugs to musical simplicity — seemed on its way out in the mid ’90s, giving way to the Britpop explosion of Blur and Oasis. Then one album changed everything, a record of defiantly, obnoxiously hardcore electronica that rocketed to number one in 23 countries. It even topped the charts in the United States, a market notoriously difficult for electronic music to crack.

That album was The Prodigy’s “Fat of the Land,” a gloating, leering, lurid masterpiece that proved electronica was definitely here to stay. It had everything you could possibly want from a great rave record: big beats, bigger choruses, utterly relentless energy. But it also had a new, more rock-oriented sound that signaled a significant shift from the band’s earlier work. On “Fat of the Land,” the Prodigy were turning from dance-floor kings into electronica’s Sex Pistols, with singer Keith Flint sneering over thrashing guitars like a techno Johnny Rotten. Never before had a rave record matched lightning-fast beats to such nihilistic aggression.

After all, the Prodigy were far from your average electronica group. They weren’t a bunch of skinny, reclusive DJs, hiding behind big headphones and bigger record collections. Far from it: The Prodigy had a sense of style and flair that outshone even the most determined pop stars, with the spiky-haired Flint and the demon-eyed MC Maxim Reality leaving indelible imprints on Western pop culture. The group’s true musical mastermind, Liam Howlett, was the techno-geek in the shadows, and he had the smarts to hide behind his extroverted vocalists in the band’s infamous live shows and even more notorious music videos.

Few who have seen it will forget the unhinged video to “Breathe,” with its crawling cockroaches and crocodiles. Fewer still will forget the video to perhaps the band’s most well-known song, “Smack My Bitch Up” — a video that has repeatedly been voted “most controversial music video ever.” If you’ve seen it, you know why. For a while in the late ’90s, it seemed like he Prodigy were all anyone ever talked about.

The high didn’t last long. “Fat of the Land” topped critics’ lists and charts worldwide, but the band’s fortunes didn’t fare so well, and by the early 2000s, internal tensions and commercial decline seemed to have spelled the end to the group. In 2004, Howlett released a critically maligned album without the help of Flint and Maxim Reality, and in 2005, a rather austere greatest hits package surfaced, seemingly sounding the death knell for one of the most successful and influential electronica groups of all time.

Well, now they’re back. “Invaders Must Die” reunites all three original members on record for the first time in a decade, and though it’s no masterpiece, it has a frenzied, compulsive energy that proves the group’s chemistry is still alive and kicking. Thankfully, the record doesn’t show Howlett pandering to contemporary tastes. The Prodigy have always prided themselves on their uncompromising stance — their most famous song is called “Smack My Bitch Up,” after all — but I was worried that after 10 years in the wilderness, they might have lost their edge.

Luckily, I was wrong. It may be 2009, but “Invaders Must Die” is a pre-Justice, pre-MSTRKRFT electronic record, free of the kind of stuttered distortion that’s been so ubiquitous over the past few years. The deliriously demented title track opens and closes with a heavily vocodered proclamation — “We are the Prodigy” — and for most of the album, that manifesto holds true. “Invaders Must Die” comes off like a belated sequel to “Fat of the Land,” trying hard to hide the intervening 12-year gap — and most of the time, it’s successful in doing so.

First single “Omen” is prime Prodigy, with a sneering Flint vocal sample thrown over a raging sea of buzz-saw synths and breakneck beats. It’s no “Firestarter,” but its energy is infectious, evoking the humorless nihilism of early ’90s rave records with gusto. In an age where most dance music is 90 percent irony, it’s a joyously uncomplicated listen. The same goes for “Thunder,” with its sing-song ragga vocals and abrasive, bass-heavy throb.

Howlett has always had a knack for taking snippets of vocals and manipulating them in brilliant and unexpected ways, and on “Invaders Must Die” he doesn’t disappoint. On the throwback house of “Warriors Dance,” for instance, he takes a sugar-sweet vocal sample and tosses it into a deafening morass of low-frequency feedback. Whereas Flint’s sneering vocals generally stand up to Howlett’s productions, here the sampled female singer sounds like a child lost in a hurricane, and it makes for a compelling listen. Of course, it’s hardly subtle, but if you were looking for subtlety, you wouldn’t be buying a Prodigy album in the first place.

And yet, “unsubtle” seems like an understatement when describing “Invaders Must Die.” The album takes pride in its garish, in-your-face aggression, and while some of the time this works nicely, over the course of an hour it’s exhausting. Each track taken on its own is perfectly listenable — from the utterly deranged “Piranha” (chorus: “teeth ripped, razor sharp / vice-like power, tear you apart”) to the creepy “Take Me to the Hospital” — but taken together, the album is a grueling experience. By the time you’re halfway through, it starts to sound like each track is trying to outdo the last in terms of unbridled hostility, and that’s no compliment. Dance records live or die on their pacing, and “Invaders Must Die” is disastrously sequenced, building an endless crescendo and only letting the tempo drop in the very last song.

That said, “Invaders Must Die” is far from a disappointment. It may sometimes come off like a hyperbolic parody of the Prodigy’s earlier work, but I’d much rather it be too energetic than listless and tired. The Prodigy became famous for being tasteless, crude and repugnant. They were electronica’s bad boys, hooligans with ugly tattoos and even uglier hairstyles. The good news? On “Invaders Must Die,” they’re just as obnoxious as ever.