Crabby birthday: The Prodigy's Fat Of The Land turns 25

The Prodigy's Fat Of The Land was released 25 years ago today. It was the fastest selling UK album of all time, and propelled the Prodge to the top of the charts with Firestarter and Breathe.

The album cover featured a zoomed-in shot of gecarcinus lateralis, otherwise know as a Bermuda land crab. It's a species of crab that is quite happy to hang out on beaches without rock pools, as long as the sand is moist enough for its gills to operate. They tend to be vegetarian, but will chomp on animal matter if needs be. Crab facts!

I'd make a cake to celebrate this anniversary, but the Prodigy never struck me as a cake kind of band. They seemed to hang out in grotty basements while writhing in threatening ways. Feels like an unhealthy place for a cake.

Fat Of The Land was incendiary. The single Smack My Bitch Up attracted claims of misogyny. Yeah, the word bitch is ugly, but I betcha if the protagonist in the video hadn't been a woman, no-one would have batted an eyelid at the video's hellraising. They should have got me to star in it. I would have stayed in listening to Future Sound of London and playing Boggle.

The album also gave us Keith Flint, God rest his sausages. The pointy-haired bovver boy became the face of rebellion in the 1990s. Keith Flint was quite happy to hang out on beaches without rock pools, and would chomp on animal matter if needs be. Apparently, Keith used to go on motorcycle rides with the saxophonist of Madness. That's an actual fact and not some nonsense about crabs. Who knew.

Music for the Jilted Generation was a more artistically interesting album as it turned a band bordering on novelty rave into a serious act. But Fat Of The Land might the most important. Along with the Shamen, it thrust proper dance music into the uber-mainstream while, perhaps unlike the Shamen,  losing little of its musical power.

It didn't impress everyone. To finish off this short waffle, here are some reviewers who didn't get along with the fat, the land and everything between.

Leftin, Amazon
Sexist lyrics set to appalling neo-metal/house bilge. One star.

Anonymous review, Entertainment.ie
I didn't want to admit it. I refused to accept it. But somewhere in my brain, the honesty section probably, something was telling me that it was a piece of sh*t.

boogie woogie king, Amazon
ID RATHER HAVE CRABS THAN LISTEN TO THIS!!

ozzystylez, Rate Your Music
I listened to this in my car the other day. The bass kicks hard and my car has reasonably good speakers. But I found myself turning it down as I drove through areas with a lot of people on the road in case they laughed at me for listening to such a cheesy, dated and worn out record.

Carlos Mancilla, Amazon
The album arrived a little bent at the top corner leaving a wrinkle in the cardboard.

Peter Barczak, Amazon
Only bought cos it was a penny. Not played it yet. Three stars.

All of these reviewers need rock pools for survival, and so are limited in the range of beaches available to them. Happy birthday, Fat Of The Land.

Further Fats: A History Of The Prodigy For People That Can't Be Bothered Reading The Wikipedia Article (2009)

90 best electronic music albums of 2021: Flying Lotus, Helm, Herbert, Humanoid & Jana Rush

Fat Roland's Best Electronic Music Albums of 2021 presents five more brilliant albums:

Flying Lotus – Yasuke (Warp)

It's really nice to see Mr F. Lotus get his teeth into something as chunky as soundtracking a samurai series on Netflix. The telly programme evokes 16th-century feudal Japan, but this album feels much more modern. Trop hop beats, nostalgic analogue synths and fat computerised beats nestle up against its anime inspiration with the greatest of ease: lounge bar music by way of Tokyo. There's even a track (War Lords) which is Very Pink Floyd Indeed. A very different Flying Lotus experience, and we're all the better for it.

Helm – Axis (Dais Records)

"Fractured clanging, hissing steam, granular haze," says the blurb. Wait, don't go. Luke Younger's returns to his low-fi noise roots for this debut on Dias Records. Its scratched industrialisms and pained clanking rhythms are certainly matched by its track names: Moskito, Repellent. But actually, it's surprisingly tuneful if you're okay with the whole apocalyptic building site thing: there's beautiful ambience to be found in this end-times EBM. And hey, if I'm going to have a haze, I want it to be a granular one.

Herbert – Musca (Accidental)

Here's a bit of my review for Electronic Sound magazine of this latest instalment in Herbert's ‘domestic house’ series. "Each track is ever-so-neosoul, new jazzy standards made for a Gilles Peterson playlist... This is Herbert exploring his commercial rather than experimental side, the purported – and very Herbert – grunting pig and chatty fox cub samples kept largely under the radar." Forgot about the pig bits. Anyhoo, it's all very smooth and Radio 2, but Herbert always delivers everything with a wink and I love him for that.

Humanoid – 7 Songs (De:tuned)

I admit, this was a very last-minute addition to my list. This is the act that brought us Stakker Humanoid from back in the day. I'd just assumed it was some old rerelease. How wrong I was. The chap from Future Sound of London slaps us across the chops with chunky acid madness: listen to it squeal and bleep and yelp. Absolutely gorgeous. Nothing complicated: just an old drum machine and some significantly squelchy sonics. Just listen to Pyramid 17 go. 7 very good songs.

Jana Rush – Painful Enlightenment (Planet Mu) 

This album is everywhere. It's the most hyped thing since Pogs or Betamax or that time I told Charlie Norridge I could balance a bunsen burner on my willy. For her second album, this Chicago producer moves from footwork into abstract experimentalism: chopped loops get caught in powerful cycles of shuddering bass, ecstatic vocal samples and ever-present urgent drums. Like looking at a jazz club through a kaleidoscope through insect eyes. Genuinely unique. Oh and always make sure the burner's switched off first.

This is part of a series of the Best Electronic Music Albums of 2021. Read it all here.

What's in the Unbox? Techno remixes and new Future Sound of London

You know that film where there's a couple of cops and a bad guy and they're near some telegraph poles and there's something in a box and they're all like "what's in the box, what's in the box" and it turns out to be Chris Martin's head or something?

You'll be pleased to know that has nothing to do with the latest in the Unboxed Brain series of remixed records that span off from last year's Brainbox album from De:tuned. Listen to samples below.

This seventh remix EP has techno heavyweights Kirk Degiorgio, Mark Broom and The Black Dog producing reworks of techno heavyweights B12 and Scanner, while there is a new track from techno heavyweights Future Sound of London.

No wonder its unboxed - it's too heavy to lift.



Further Fats: Saturday night, I feel my brain is getting hot (2012)

Instrumental electronic floof for your creative ears

Here are some old instrumental albums I've been using as a writing soundtrack recently.

They're all pretty much of an era and style, and they're scuzzy YouTube rips, but if you need something for your (un)conscious mind to surfboard on, dive in.

There's one that's not featured below, and that's B12's Electro Soma (band pictured above). It's non-embeddable, but you can click through to it here.

Go listen. Then buy the albums because they're right cracking, they are.









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New York, London, Paris, Munich, everybody talk about complicated electronica with difficult time signatures and a limited listening demographic

XFM are asking listeners to vote on the bestest song of all timest everest.

I don't care. Firstly, I don't listen to XFM. Secondly, it involves other people's opinions.

These polls can go wrong, like the Telegraph's 100 Greatest Songs which stuffed Love Will Tear Us Apart down the back of the proverbial sofa at number 25 while dedicating the top ten to what looks like Mojo magazine's greatest hits.

And thirdly, whether it's a rock or a dance radio station, such polls inevitably miss out electronica.

Yet - and here, dear reader, is the point of this whole piece - writing a good electronica track is about knowing how to pen a great pop song.

Orbital once wrote an ethereal critique of body image called I Wish I Had Duck Feet. It started off unassumingly enough, with reedy percussion bopping over a looped water sample.

But it then builds and builds with melancholic chords swelling to a drum-rolled climax. It never threatens to be chart-worthy at any point, but it is as a perfect a four-minute pop song as Orbital ever wrote.

Their radio edit of Halcyon (as opposed to their long, beautiful sprawling epic Halcyon + On + On) is also worth a mention too.

The Future Sound Of London's Papua New Guinea is probably electronica's greatest pop song, in that it's short, structured, catchy but still unrelentingly electronica.

As a pithy pop package, it's up there with but better than Come To Daddy (pictured), Arcadian, 5:23 and In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country. Okay, some of those are a bit long to be 'pop', but there's something joyfully attractive and self-contained about them.

It's not just old tracks. Clark's Growls Garden signalled a move towards catchiness, having used vocals heavily in his music for the first time.

So I would encourage all other electronica artists to do the same. Aphex, let's have your own version of Song 2. Can we please have action dolls of Global Communication?

And Venetian Snares, you need a bit of glam retro like Girls Aloud, maybe trying out some sassy hip movements in a glittering, flowing dress.

Crikes. I think I fancy Venetian Snares.

Future Sound Of London hog the limelight. I'll be in my bathroom.

The Future Sound Of London are a bunch of selfish bumholes.

By my reckoning, they've had seven album releases in the last 12 months. Seven. I don't think I achieved seven of anything in the past year.

I probably had more than seven poos, but that's about it.

Here's the evidence. They started with the Pulse EPs, an album-length rerelease of old things they did under different names before Coolio was in the charts.

Secondly, they continued the blowing-off-the-dust theme with From the Archives Vol. 4, which boasted more than a smattering of tracks from old LPs (ISDN, Dead Cities and Lifeforms).

Environments, their long-awaited album in July, was a shuffling of old material that did a pretty good impression of the classic KLF album Chill Out.

About the same time, Amorphous Androgynous released The Peppermint Tree And The Seeds Of Superconsciousness. What's that got to do with Future Sound Of London? They're the same band.

The fifth album of the year was Yage's world-music offering The Woodlands Of Old, featuring an ex-Propellerhead on drums. Yage is FSOL's engineer. Except Yage isn't, because Yage is actually the guys from FSOL pretending to be their engineer. Confused yet?

They followed this up with the fifth volume of From the Archives Vol.5, alongside a second volume of Environments. That's seven albums, people. They are the James Pattinson of the music world.

I think they are being selfish. Hogging a whole year like that.

They also released a recording of oscillators that reacted to the movement of clouds across the Sun. They are working on a musical remix of a film directed by an Oscar-winning animator. And their gig later this year, as I mentioned in my recent 2009 preview, opens up the possibility of them performing their first new live material for 12 years.

Despite all this, I still think the only guaranteed pleasure in life is having a poo. Think on, FSOL.

mpSunday: In the latest of a series where I give away free music (now not necessarily on a Sunday), get your teeth around this Wipeout 2097 classic. PING!  This mpSunday has now expired.

A mallet-pawing, arm-throating, wrestle-bashing preview of 2009 (part two)

I'd better get my 2009 preview finished before this whole New Year lark becomes unfashionable.

March.

Berlin adrenalin-techno kid (and former classical violinist, 'pparently) Tim Exile will plant his Listening Tree album.

The Future Sound Of London, whose artwork make gatefold vinyl a pleasure to ogle at, will play their first live date for over a decade at the Bloc weekender. It is unlikely to be as frenetic as Dan Deacon's live performanced.  Deacon counts a mallet among his percussion instruments, and has been taking to the stage with a synth-heavy 14-piece ensemble at recent gigs.  For that reason alone, seek out his new long-player Bromst.

Oh and former members of Plone and Broadcast have formed Seeland, who I reckon are a hot tip for 2009. When you clap ears on their debut album, you'll spot whispers of Stereolab and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

The rest of 2009.

One of Paul Simon's favourite bands, Grizzly Bear should give Warp Records a new album in May, or thereabouts.  Speaking of Mr Simon, I still haven't forgiven the garfunkled-one for Graceland.  And while we're at it, I'm still boycotting Sly Stallone films for the travesty that is his 1996 movie Daylight.

If I kept my CDs on shelves, with my favourite artists on the higher shelves, and my least favourite artists on the lower shelves, Plaid would have their very own shelf about fourteen miles above my house. They are putting the finishing touches to their album Scintilli, and it will be released on Warp some time in the middle of the year.

In August, Orbital will morph together for their first live performance since John Peel's Maida Vale sessions, this time at the Big Chill. As I said in this post back in November, they have promised it won't be "an exercise in nostalgia". Of course, we all know it will.

Portishead ended 2009 without a record contract, so expect some In Rainbows-style tomfoolery with their fourth album. It should be out around September.

On a more commercial tip, ex-Pop Idol contestant (spit!) and new darling of the press Little Boots will claim 2009 as her own. She's worth watching because she uses a Tenori-on, which is a pretty Japanese music making box that lights up. The same people who rave about 'Boots enthuse about La Roux.

Finally, you may need to strap me down because I am insanely excited about one particular artist.  The Glaswegian Hudson Mohawke refers to everything as "shite" on his Myspace page.  He's not being negative: he's just being, well, Scottish.

Mohawke is a new signing to Warp Records, and he flips between electronica, hip hop, electro and soul in ways that really shouldn't be possible.

Someone somewhere labelled his music as "emotronic" (probably H-Mo himself).  He's working on an album which should sound a little like this:

Narrating icon presumes a little too much, i.e. an ability to actually narrate

I can't tell a Picasso from a Punto, but watching Formula One motor racing makes me as excited as playing Wipeout 2097 with Future Sound Of London's We Have Explosive pummelling my ears. (Yeah, I still have a PS1.)

This Sunday I become an F1 pundit on a sports show called Talking Balls. I'll be foaming at the mouth about the race at Spa Francorchamps in Belgium, my favourite F1 track, and fuming at the ears about McLaren and Alonso spying their way to success.

If F1 isn't your thing, and why should it be, then don't fear. I won't start blathering about it on this site when I've got another site to do that.

But if you do tune in, then do it on Wythenshawe FM from 7pm this Sunday September 16th. Lock on to 97.2FM if you're within a gnat's thong of Wythenshawe, or listen online on their website.

Oh and I'll be using my real proper full name, which is an anagram of 'I on racing rant' and also 'narrating icon'.

Berlin's Vector Lovers are marching like an army with pinheads for shoes

Vector Lovers' (pictured) spanking new album Afterglow is just a little too pristine, like Future Sound Of London's rambling era without the ever-present peril of descent into hell.

At first listen, it seems to live closer to the surface than the usual subterranean Soma techno, but the shallow end is deeper than you think.

Half-Life is all breathless synths and sinister crackles, while Last Day Of Winter is watery and hesitant.

A Field marches like an army with pinheads for shoes. The delicate Piano Dust is heart-breaking and intimate, and that's the key; the album is so well produced, every padding bassdrum and swooshing chord pours straight into your eardrums.

Afterglow will reward you with what it says on the tin. Go buy.

At the other end of the spectrum, maybe on a secondary spectrum complete with its own biohazard label, is the tumultuous mayhem of Shitmat's new offering Grooverider.

Don't be hoodwinked by the reference to the drum and bass legend; this is old skool Britney-sampling jungle cut and pasted into fresh genres that didn't even exist five minutes ago.

It's inevitably formulaic: cranked-up breaks stabbed with broken vocals and sporadically laid to waste by doom-mongering sirens or pant-wobbling sub-bass.

But it's fun tee-hee, just like his earlier track Agricultural Ardcore, which was the god-awful Archer's theme tune hacked to a stump.

If Shitmat is Red Bull laced with amphetamines, Bola's latest album Kroungrine is peppermint tea laced with nothing. Not so much a downer as, well, a bit boring.

It lies somewhere between DJ Shadow and lounge jazz, but it is certainly neither. They should nick a trick or two from the Vector Lovers.

The ins and outs of the uprise of downloads

From their ebony and ivory tower, the moguls that control pop music have allowed any download to count toward the top 40.

This new rule, which started on January 1st two-double-oh-seven, means a song can chart even if it isn't available as an actual single on an actual rack in an actual record shop. Before this momentous decision, download sales were tied in with current singles only.

>Guru Josh

So if enough of us download it, Guru Josh's Infinity (for example) could be the next number one. Or Bananarama's Venus. Any old record, really.

We could even get Everything I Do I Do It For You back to number one because, I don't know about you, I couldn't get enough of it first time around.

Even better (and this is motivated by my deep shame that Leader Of The Gang was number one when I was born), if you are about to drop a sprog, you could download something like The Cure or Kraftwerk to make sure something cool was top of the pops when your child was born.

>Blank spaces

An interesting consequence will be seen in record shops across the UK. If a song sells well that isn't available on CD, the stores will fill the blank spaces in their top 40 display with notices saying you can buy the song online.

Imagine an entire high street music shop consisting only of signs saying "you can't buy this here" and "go home and download this instead". At last, HMV will have realised their dream of zero customer service.

>Two colour graph

Single sales doubled in 2006 because of downloads. This amazing, fantastic two colour graph demonstrates the rise of digital sales against 'real' singles.

I must admit, I was in HMV the other day and very nearly spent £20 until I remembered I could get the same thing from Bleep for a lot less.

>Cover art

Which brings me to the only thing that makes me sad about the uprise in downloads. I discovered a lot of electronica through buying records because of their cover art. At the top of this post is the graf-style sleeve of the Sabres Of Paradise's Theme. I had no idea who they were when I bought it, but I loved the design.

I reckon too that I wouldn't been as quick to discover Aphex Twin, Boards Of Canada, Underworld, Orbital or early ambience like Feed Your Head if it wasn't for my ability to be impressed by a pretty picture. Can we live in a world where we will never know the astonishment of Future Sound Of London's CG cleverness ever again?

>Snuffing-out

The reality is somewhere inbetween one end of the stick and the other. What will happen is record companies will, upon realising the imminent snuffing-out of the CD, beef up new releases with extra DVDs, multi-gatefold packaging, fold-out posters, fan badges, blow-up dolls and free crossbows to stimulate sales and excite their wallets.

So then, off to i-Tunes with you. Ooh ooh ah, time for the guru.