Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 17/10/05
Label: XL Records

Zeitgeists are notoriously tricky beasts to catch. A few manage it once (T Rex, Oasis), even fewer manage it twice (Damon Albarn with "Park Life" and Gorillaz), but those who pull it off even more can be counted on your fingers. There's Bowie, obviously, there's Madonna and there's also Liam Howlett's The Prodigy. "Their Law" is therefore a rather more fascinating greatest hits album than most, showcasing The Prodigy's ability to evolve with the times without losing the reckless pace, magpie sampling and aggression that is their musical identity.

None of this was obvious when the band first broke with "Charly". The crunching breakbeats, squelching synths and novelty samples may have heralded the arrival of hardcore rave culture into the mainstream, but it wasn't until the still exhilarating "Out Of Space" that suspicions were raised that The Prodigy might be more than a flash in the pan.

A point proven by second album "Music For The Jilted Generation", a raging reflection of a time when dance culture had taken a darker turn, from gun fights at the Hacienda to the gradual replacement of ecstasy with nastier, dirtier drugs. So while the bruising "No Good (Start The Dance)" had the pace and chorus of a hit, songs like "Poison" and "Voodoo People" were much darker beasts, full of dread, anger and - crucially - guitars.

Those guitars led to Howlett's next trick, and with the fusing of dance beats and raw rock dynamics on "Firestarter", he pulled it off in spectacular style. Overfamiliarity may have dulled the sheer gut punch of "Firestarter", but its impact was seismic on both sides of the Atlantic. It was so enormous, indeed, that it seemed likely to topple the old barriers between dance and rock, and that this never quite happened can't be blamed on Howlett. "Firestarter"'s impressive follow-up was the overpowering "Breathe", its barrage of grimy noise and swampy synth line making it the nastiest Number One ever.

Sadly, this monstrous success seemed to paralyse Howlett and it was six years before he released the embarrassing retread "Baby's Got A Temper" (wisely excluded here). Recent work such as "Girls" has recaptured The Prodigy's old energy, but the band now sound a little out of time where once they were fantastically of their time. It seems unlikely that the married and golf-playing Howlett will ever make another generation-defining record, but in the meantime he has left us with this fascinating, eclectic and often brilliant greatest hits album.

    by Jaime Gill