The Prodigy @ The Hordern,Sydney (3/03/2010)

Wed 10th Mar, 2010 in Gig Reviews

The Prodigy’s performance at last year’s Big Day Out was one of the best live shows I’ve seen, which makes it all the more difficult to say that their recent sideshow performance as part of their Future Music tour was uninspiring.

This time around there was nothing particularly terrible about his performance per se, but in clear contrast to last year’s performance, he was largely cruising. Either that or he had a cold. His hair though, which stood in the shape of mischievously stunted goat’s horns, did look rather wonderful.

Opening with World’s On Fire, from 2009’s Invaders Must Die, it was instantly apparent, as we stood on the fringe of the dance floor mass, that this was as loud as it was going to get. We shouldn’t have been able to hear people more than a metre away from us singing the lyrics to Breathe, but we could.

Omen followed, and having the aforementioned thirteen-year-old classic (which, like most of their older material, has aged exceptionally well) sandwiched between these two Invaders tracks only highlighted the fact that there is just something missing in their new material. Where their older tracks were raw, dirty, punkish creatures that crawled up wide-eyed and jittery from an underground rave at 6am, their new material seems punkish in the “Does It Offend You… No Really, Does It?” sense of the word.

It’s as if with Invaders they were trying to bunnyhop onto the polished, riff-driven “electro-punk” trend that swept 2007 to 2009 before everyone opted to ride the chillwave instead. The boys still spit and snarl and yell menacing things to the crowd, but only because that is what’s expected of them. “You’d better fucking run…” Flint warns the crowd, to which you can only really reply, “But from what, Keith?”

Poison, with its instantly-recognisable stream of “yar!” against a darkly ominous baseline was a highlight, Maxim Reality on main vocals and well and truly in his element as frontman for the night. While the wayward Flint was a combination of sluggish gestures to the crowd and occasional mid-song hugs with their unwitting live drummer, Leo Crabtree, the sinewy Maxim was a powerhouse of hypnotic stage presence. New tracks, Thunder and Warrior’s Dance followed, before Firestarter sent the crowd mental.

The timeless Voodoo People, with its hard-as-nails Nirvana-inspired opening riff, never fails to cause a crowd to collectively lose their shit, while Invaders Must Die felt like a pseudo-RATM moment with its aggressive political undertones and intense strobe flashes. Diesel Power had its melody slightly twisted and bastardised, which felt a little wrong, but the song is still dynamite however you twist and tug at it. As is Smack My Bitch Up, but it was largely ruined by the bizarre crowd participation gimmick that saw Flint instruct everyone to “get the fuck down” so we could all jump back up at the appropriate climactic moment. Yes folks, it was absolutely as naff as it sounds.

But after all of this, the highs of Voodoo People and Poison, and the lows of Omen and Invaders Must Die, nothing made my heart sink quite like the silence that preceded their encore. Such a stark contrast to last year, when they performed two encores, not because they were being self-indulgent, but because there probably would’ve been a riot if they didn’t. This time, no one cheered, they just kind of shuffled their feet and waited for the inevitable. Fortunately they chose an old track, 1994’s Their Law, which perfectly showcases the sinister, smoke-filled basement vibe that is so lacking in Invaders.

Hopefully this was just an off-night. That things were so different last year suggests that it was. Or perhaps nostalgia has become the boys’ worst enemy at this stage.

Check out the photos from the gig