Source: Cover
The Prodigy‘s latest album has absolutely no right to be as enjoyable as it was. The Electronic group returned after a six-year break from releasing new material to give us an album that sounds like they never left. The Day Is My Enemy was the sound of a group not really attempting to adapt to modern times but supplying us with a series of songs that were bound to go down a treat with their fans in a live set. 14 tracks of massive Big Beat songs filled with buzzwords that will be chanted with euphoria by their ever-loyal fanbase.
The Night Is My Friend is merely an accompanying piece for the album rather than a stand-alone project, as the album title and cover suggests; it features two remixes, two songs edited from the album and one original song. Other than obviously creating something for the diehard fans, in many ways sections of this EP tries to give us something that the actual album didn’t – The Prodigy being done through the scope of modern electronic music.
The tracks that are actually curated by The Prodigy themselves are predictably slices of energetic fun on this EP. The brand new song, ‘AWOL‘ which many will know from their live performances of the track where the song was an anthemic slice, has been made a lot more hard-hitting and frantic with the vocals being pushed back slightly for the instrumentation. Although it’s very short it’s good they actually gave the track some time of day even if it would have slotted in perfectly on the actual album. The edits themselves on here for ‘Get Your Fight On‘ and ‘Rhythm Bomb‘ don’t have massive standout differences to the album’s versions, but they do make the tracks more concise blasts of energy with the fat around the edges being trimmed to great benefit such as the intro on ‘Rhythm Bomb’ being shortened greatly.
The remixes by Rene LaVice (for Rebel Radio) and Caspa (for the album’s title track) are somewhat predictable in a sense too, in that the songs are filtered through the most obvious of lenses. The remix of the song ‘Rebel Radio‘ gets the treatment where it’s chopped up and stuck back together with the song’s vocal sample used in a different fashion and little bass blasts and slices of percussion from the original are sampled and used a lot more frequently and in your face. It tries many times to be as energetic as it possibly can making the track less conventional than the original.
The remix of the title track knows its place and doesn’t overstay it’s welcome lasting just 3 minutes or so spinning the original song structure into a track with a much slower tempo, with laidback dubstep drops that sound extremely brooding and dark with those smooth high-pitched vocals sounding fantastic for the aesthetic of the track.
This EP isn’t an essential listen for a Prodigy fan other than the one original track on here that should have been on the album. The Night Is My Friend is a bit of fun if you’ve already ploughed through The Day Is My Enemy multiple times and need something more, but don’t expect much of what’s on here to hold your interest for too much time even if there are tracks that have been made to sound more immediate.
