Goodbye Charly… The Prodigy release Music for the Jilted Generation… [1994]

“You can forget about that bloody cat for a start. It is possible there are a few dozen indie sneerers left for whom The Prodigy are still the capering, cheesy-grinned ravey Double Deckers responsible only for ‘Charly’…”

So begins this review, dated from August 1994, of The Prodigy’s latest album, Music for the Jilted Generation, which featured in Select magazine, a predominantly indie publication that occasionally displayed a soft spot for all things electronic.

As reviewer Andrew Harrison suggests, since hitting the charts with the aforementioned Charly, The Prodigy spent two years ‘carpet bombing the proper charts with the most ragingly excellent pop techno warheads imaginable’, and the album – arguably the one that made the band international stars, is suitably lauded.

‘Music for the Jilted Generation is possibly the best electronic pop record you’ll hear this year, the instant headers of hardcore techno studded over with irresistible hooks and harnessed to a series of merciless grooves,’ Harrison writes. ‘It sounds like the whole record was built as Liam Howlett’s sophisticated fuck-you to the underground tastemakers. Listen, it says, I can do this, and I do it better than all of you.’

Awarding the album five stars, he suggests that The Prodigy should be ‘clasped tight as one of our very best techno talents’, suggesting that this album might be the band’s Parklife – no doubt a nod to the indie bores of the period that couldn’t see the point of music beyond Blur or Oasis.

Some 23 years on, it remains a landmark album from a glorious period in the history of dance music.

[Article screenshot taken from Select Magazine Scans blog]

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