This DVD, featuring live performances and music videos by The Prodigy, can be seen as a bit of a history reel for the band.
The heart of the DVD, Live at Brixton Academy, gets off to a jolting start: A naked man announces The Prodigy, and Liam jumps behind the keyboards. The rest of the band slowly strolls into the picture, and Smack My Bitch Up begins as the crowd roars. MC Maxim Reality seems to channel Lil' Jon as he screams YEAH! and WHAT! into his microphone, but this performance far precedes the phenomenon virtually created by Dave Chappelle. A couple of old favorites like Voodoo People go through the speakers, however, most of the tracks are from The Fat of the Land album. Most songs sound virtually identical to the album versions; a live drummer and a guitarist (interesting against the programmed beats) and the random interjections of Reality, along with some minor tweaks here and there by Liam, are the only real differences I could spot. The impression that I get out of the performance is that it really seems more like a rock concert than anything else; the only people really dancing are the crew onstage. That's not to say that the crowd is just milling about apathetically, of course; they're all jumping along to the beat.
The other hefty section of this DVD weighs in with the music videos. I find these to be far more interesting and enjoyable than the live performances; for one, there is no screaming by Reality to distract me from the rest of the video. There is also more of a sense of experimentation and remix in this section. Small pieces of the tracks have been tweaked to really engage the listener who has heard these tracks perhaps too many times in their original form. This section could definitely have benefitted from being ordered chronologically; I couldn't really find much sense into the way these videos were ordered. It is, however, relatively easy to place the oldest videos in the chronology, as their production values are generally much lower. A strange video, which I can't really make any sense of, comes in the video for the recent song Girls, which looks like, well, a Max Headroom music video circa the 80's. A fun look at the past is in One Love, whose accompanying 3-D animation is so atrocious by today's standards that it is simply laughable. Out of all of these, my favorite video is for the remix of the Voodoo People song, which is accompanied by an interesting concept where blindfolded and bound people race for a prize.
Extra performances moonlight on the DVD: We see a live performance of Break and Enter in the historic Glastonbury performance, where The Prodigy managed to beat out those feuding Gallagher brothers. (No, not these guys, these guys. But in these performances, we see more of a tendency to massage the original recordings into something new, more of a general push towards creativity. That, and Keith Flint rolling around in a giant hamster ball make this portion worth a view. Another section is devoted to Making Of videos; these, however, do not highlight the actual production process, but more the bands sense of humor.
All in all, I would say that I could only recommend this DVD to fans of The Prodigy, as I doubt others would enjoy anywhere near to the whole thing. However, for a neat slice of Prodigy's history, you really can't beat this DVD. Note to the parents, if the song title Smack My Bitch Up didn't clue you in, I'll give you a big fat warning as this DVD features male and female nudity.