The Economic Times

'White album', 'No Tourists' and more: Music for the gilded generation

• 20th November 2018
• Indrajit Hazra

This one isn’t for the nostalgia-nibblers.

Technically, this one isn’t for the nostalgia-nibblers. Coming out in the same week as the 50th deluxe reissue edition of The Beatles’ ‘White album’ — an outtake of Paul McCartney harmonising with John Lennon in ‘Julia’ having being scrutinised by reviewers already as if it’s the alternate ending of Nabokov’s Lolita. And album No. 14 of the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series, ‘More Blood, More Tracks’, there being a reason why the opening track ‘Tangled Up in Blue (Take 3, Remake 3)’ didn’t make it to the ‘Blood on the Tracks’, The Prodigy’s seventh studio album, ‘No Tourists’ can sound downright fresh out of the oven. Funnily enough though, even with its fresh batch of firestarting tracks, it’s 1990s backbeat from the Essex band, rejigged, nostalgised via the nebuliser.

Songwriter-keyboardist Liam Howlett reminds us how primal a beat is, even in these days of anaemic ‘emo’ music, in ‘Fight Fire with Fire’. As hardcore hiphop duo Ho99o9 (I was told that’s pronounced ‘Horror’) belts out, “The dog is barking mad, has gone and run away with no leash/ The heat is coming/ Stop running, leave your blood on the streets/ We stick together, stormy weather/ We don’t f**** with police,” we are in half-Marilyn Manson county and half-Banksy borough — that is, before the street artist became a Sotheby’s performing one. The chorus, tripping up curtains like kerosenehelped flames, crown the song like a drunkard on a throne. Listening to this track you aren’t woke, stupid. You are awake.

In ‘Champions of London’, the serrated beat is like a caught zipper. The mastery that big beat has over blood becomes clear as the track frenetically ferrets about both physical and sonic spaces. ‘Bassline drama’ cuts through your armour/Dobson to Brixton, the friction’ may sound dated as a call to arms, but it still has a red bull in Chinatown charm about it. We don’t get to notice old bandmate Keith ‘Smack My B**** Up’ Flint’s voice much. He’s credited on the song, so I’ll take it.

The title track is more symphonic — one almost expecting either Jimmy Page or Slash to emerge from behind the two turn tables and-a-microphone. ‘Resonate’ sounds like a Dalek party song, and has too many things going on, and not in a good way. Which unlike ‘Timebomb Zone’, even with its EDM heavy pump-the-dance floor, is more effective as a body wrapper.

‘Boom Boom Tap’, a track for Godzilla if he crashed the party, has rapper Andy Milonakis pegging the music clothesline for novelty pace-changing value. But ‘No Tourists’ scores when it’s more frantic. Tracks like ‘Light Up the Sky’, with another Prodigy old-hand Maxim throwing out lines like speed-laced pixie-dust (the Babylon Zoo ‘Spaceman’ baby alien voice doesn’t work for me, though), and ‘Give Me a Signal’, have the old Prodigy spectral lines, but don’t reach their thermal levels.

Don’t expect a resurrection of ‘Music for the Jilted Generation’ (1994) or ‘The Fat of the Land’ (1997) in ‘No Tourists’. But then, you aren’t. The other option being nitpicks of the ‘White album’ and ‘Blood on the Tracks'.

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• No Tourists

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