(Muso's Guide, 22 November 2009)
Album review
Post-Take That, Robbie Williams was a renaissance in motion. Drinking, smoking and actually living after so many years in boyband servitude, his spirit was released and his nascent music career sputtered to life.
Sputtered initally, until the might of ‘Angels’ swept through karaoke bars from Fochabers to Fowey and back.
With the guiding hand of Guy Chambers on the tiller, the good ship RW made a beeline for legendary status, and he got halfway there. But time - and ego, having landed - lay heavy on the writing partnership.
After a few years in the wilderness of LA, Rob is back from following Martians, rehabbing, balancing his chi, or whatever else the gossip rags are saying. He wasn’t putting any thought or effort into the big ‘comeback’, if a listen to Video Killed The Reality Star is anything to go by.
The album kicks off with ‘Morning Sun’, which is itself preceded by the mouth organ part from ‘Thunder Road’. That human touch is forgotten as the track swells into an adenoidal torch song with Elton John at its core, all bombast and insincerity. The incongruity of an ‘I Am The Walrus’- style chant amongst the cloying strings only serves to underline RW’s egomania - there ain’t nothing that he can’t carry off, this legend in his own mind.
Single ‘Bodies’ doesn’t get better with repeated listens, coming from ‘Wild Wild West’ and merging into a Backstreet Boys B-side. The issue of Williams’ lyricism comes to light starkly here. He seems to be bent on making clever-clever puns and pop cultural references, but it is at the cost of any comprehensible meaning- “God gave me the sunshine/Then showed me my lifeline/I was told it was all mine/Then I got laid on a ley line/What a day, what a day”. For a lead single, it’s not much of a leader, but it’s sort of the best we got.
From there it’s onto the Showaddywaddy swagger of ‘You Know Me’ - sappy as Sarah Brown and twice as outdated, ‘Do You Mind’ - like the J. Geils Band without a sense of humour complete with the exhaustively self-aware line “This is a song full of metaphors” and so on.
The low point would have to be ‘Blasphemy’, a track that insists on giving RW a low piano/rich voice singing part that he simply doesn’t have the range or resonance in his voice to carry.
The title of the record was hailed by tabloids et al for its chutzpah, but really it means nothing - just another lame attempt by this pop music has-been to regain some of that old renaissance magic.
