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I could start this review from the end: there's really nothing to listen to here, please move along. No one expected a masterpiece from the Prodigy after Invaders Must Die, but neither did an album as shamelessly derivative as The Day is My Enemy, an album approximative even from the most unsuspected point of view, the technical one. Liam Howlett has always accustomed us quite well in the past, even though he continues to run out of steam when he's not relying on the (brilliant and indisputable) manipulation of rhythmic samples. But here he seems lazier than usual, except for a few exceptions, creating an album that at times sounds terribly cheap in its sounds (cheap, as the English would say). On the artistic side, however, the matter is much more complex. Few doubt that the ex-prodigy kid from Essex has got what it takes, but after the reunion with bandmates Maxim and Keith Flint precisely for Invaders Must Die, Howlett is definitively imprisoned in the style he himself created, having to essentially produce studio works functional to the health of the Prodigy machine. Perhaps, in the end, it's not even that great a condemnation, after almost 25 years of contrasts between artistic impulses and box office requirements, it was decided to give full space to the latter. Amen. Howlett promised a concentrate of energy for this album, at least from this point of view he didn't lie.
The entire album is essentially designed to be played live and it's not surprising that it contains already known live tracks like Rok-Weiler and Destroy, while it's quite disconcerting to find that these tracks work better on stage than in your own stereo. Surely the least "album" album of The Prodigy, The Day is My Enemy is rather a generous (in terms of the number of songs), encyclopedic compilation that continues the pattern of the previous album but proves this time unable to find the balance between tradition and the new, also due to the scene having radically changed compared to six years ago. All the songs are extremely simple and stretched over a few endlessly repeated ideas, it's no coincidence that they rarely exceed four minutes, few surprises and almost all relegated to mere decorations. The same vocal performances by Maxim and Keith get lost among the sounds, not appearing particularly necessary nor justified. The heart of the album is represented by the title track, Wild Frontier and Nasty, unsurprisingly already singles and steeped in a lethal déjà vu. For each track, a counterpart from the prodigious catalog comes to mind, but with the terrible aftertaste of cynical speculation rather than constructive self-quotation.
Going into detail, it is surprising how Howlett is obsessed with the rhythmic solution of Firestarter, certainly one of his greatest masterpieces, okay, but offering it up pedantically in Rebel Radio and partially in Nasty narrows the line between nostalgic recall and the exhaustion of ideas. In Get Your Fight On we witness the exasperation of the concept, being a remake of Take me to the Hospital from the previous album. And yet again. Collaborations with famous artists continue to introduce the sound to the younger generations, this time it's the turn of Flux Pavilion, who steps into the ring for the very flashy Rhythm Bomb. Inexplicably, even for this it's impossible not to think of Warrior's Dance for the use of '90s vocal samples, only with a decidedly less pleasant overall result. More interesting is Ibiza, made together with Sleaford Mods, adding punk oddities in line with the group's (dirty) strings, although, as if on purpose, as a sound some memories from the time of Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned come back. Oh well.
Another annoying element of the album is the regular presence of ethnic samples so dear to Howlett, but increasingly out of place, especially in Rebel Radio and Medicine. We agree that in this aspect it is a matter of taste, but I find them filler-diversions just as annoying, having never appreciated them even in the days of The Fat of The Land. A problem of mine. Yet amidst the grooves of this mechanical-dietary toy rave punk work, one can find some glimpses of light, like the pleasant Invisible Sun, almost in search of a British pop vein, Beyond the Deathray and the conclusion represented by the boisterous Wall of Death, perhaps the only representatives that manage to establish a natural and honest contact with the era of Experience and Music for the Jilted Generation. But those times are now gone, the Prodigy have now stopped unleashing that sparkling sense of wonder and prefer to limit themselves to low-cost entertainment, sounding like a parody of themselves. Too bad, even though this won't prevent the crowd below from going wild. The review was written by a long-time fan of the group, who uses The Day is My Enemy to go running, after all.
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