"Invaders Must Die" is The Prodigy's fifth album and is 40 minutes of having your head battered by future nostalgia, serotonin levels twisted by feel-good horrorcore and your synapses snapped by whiplash attitude. It's the sound of The Prodigy mixing up genres, contorting the past and rewiring the future, ram-raiding through the tranquility of music's status quo like a blot on the landscape of England's dreaming. The first thing you notice about "Invaders Must Die" is how complete it sounds, a consistent collection of bangers all firing from the same cannon. The next thing you notice about the album is just how melodic it is. Not just melody in the vocal sense but in the heyday-of-hardcore keyboard-hookline sense. Yes, if The Prodigy have learned anything from the hugely successful live shows it was that those old skool rave anthems still rock hard - and are every bit as iconic to their generation as punk was to the nation's forty-somethings. So "Invaders Must Die" is awash with references to the free party generation, thundering along like the mother of all E-rushes, all hair-tingling, spine-jumping and lips buzzing. But not a retroactive arms-in-the-air, water-sharing nostalgia trip, but a set fuelled by punk's saliva-dripping rabid snarl. Grrr!
