The Prodigy – Invaders Must Die (Box Set) (2009)

September 3, 2013
The Prodigy – Invaders Must Die (Box Set) (2009)

Hello and welcome to the Lines In Wax 250th post extravaganza! It’s taken just over two years (and just under 20k hits), but we got there in the end, eh? It only seems like yesterday that I was doing the 100th post special; I can’t believe how fast time goes. Anyway, here’s to the next 250 posts…it’s safe to say I already know what I’m gonna do for the big 500th – now that’s thinking ahead. Cheers all! (2021 Edit: you can see the original 250th post on the old Blogspot here)

Holy mother, look at the size of this package! (That’s what she definitely did not say). Whilst I question the point in splitting an entire album over a series of 7″s (didn’t Botch do something like this once?) I gotta admit that it looks absolutely fucking cool as fuck. Granted, it is a massive potch changing the disc over after every single song, but I did play them all through once just for the sheer fuck of it. The Prodigy seem to release all their own stuff these days through the oddly-named Take Me To The Hospital label, which is a sub-label of the UK independent Cooking Vinyl. This box is a walloper of a collector’s item as you can probably tell from the photos, and it includes 5 orange 7″s, a CD/DVD version of the album, a bonus CD entitled Lost Beats, a poster and a bunch of graffiti stencils in case you love The Prodigy a little bit too much and have to tag that shit all up over the neighbourhood.

Invaders Must Die is a strong record. I’m not sure if it really is the logical progression for Liam Howlett and co., but there are plenty of absolute facking bangers in this little box. “Omen” I’m sure you’ve all heard a hundred thousand times on the tele; on music channels, as background music on TV programs from 2009 and as the theme song for every single fucking cage fighter this side of the fucking Atlantic ocean. “Thunder” brings massive dub wup wups and ragga-man talky-talking to the table, whilst “Colours” is catchy and fast enough to still be played to the sweat-drenched, ecstasy-guzzling rave crowd.

My favourite song on this album though would have to be “Warrior’s Dance”, which opens up all epic and grandiose as fuck, before breaking into a filthy beat led by a squeaky-voiced female that seems to have fallen out of a crappy hardsytle mp3 mix and onto this record. As a rule I normally hate the squeaky-voiced shite that is slathered all over bedroom-grade dance music, but we all know that this vocal style was stolen from the rave scene and guess who were big leaders back then….The fuckin’ Prodigy! So it’s ok for them to use squeaky voices in songs. That’s logical right? My second favourite song is actually the mostly-instrumental “Omen Reprise”, that for a bit, almost sounds like latter-day Gary Numan. Unfortunately for purists, this short track is excluded from the orange 7″s for some pointless fucking reason.

Just as unfortunately, Lost Beats isn’t up to much, but it does make for some half-decent background music. I think that the beats should have stayed just that; lost. Despite that, this package is absolutely awesome as piss, but I wouldn’t really recommend it to anyone unless they were a ginormous Prodigy fan. But, if that were the case, they’d probably own this anyway. I would severely recommend picking up the simple CD version though; if you love a bit of electronic music, that is. Right then, time to wrap this up. I’ve got an evening of snorting charlie and driving my Kappa-wearing girlfriend around the Gurnos estate in my Vauxhall Nova to attend to.

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