Robbie Williams was at his best when he was a cheeky monkey. While his cocky peak was around his
Rock DJ
days of 2000, even when he sung those soaring early ballads of his - like
Angels
and
Millennium
- his slightly rude and bratty persona was always ready to leap out.
These days, as his latest album
Reality Killed the Video Star
shows, Williams has become an earnest pop crooner and balladeer.
It's easy to poke criticism at him since he's a superstar who has sold more than 55 million albums - and he was the biggest British musician in the late 90s/early 2000s. But his solo career heyday - and the days of selling millions of albums for that matter - is well and truly over.
Reality Killed the Video Star
is utterly harmless stuff.
His attempts at funny and clever lyrics often come across as try-hard and a little lame. "Microwave yourself today," he sings as the opening line of
Deceptacon
. It's enough to make you skip back to the start of the track to check if you heard him right. You did.
Then there's the equally odd and silly question, "How do you rate the morning sun?".
It's not as if the sun is in a gymnastics or diving contest Robbie - and it's even more cringey because it's the opening line of the album.
Musically, the orchestration is nice enough, with long lush string arrangements offset by a rock band-meets-big band type arrangement.
But apart from the cowbell-driven
Do You Mind
, the dreamy disco of
Starstruck
, and
Difficult For Weirdos
, where he channels Madonna and the Pet Shop Boys, the majority of the album is made up of ineffectual and sometimes soppy ballads.
Not even the forlorn glitch and pulse of
Last Days of Disco
kicks into a
Rock DJ
moment. Or maybe that's just Williams being ironic?
There were high hopes that this album would get his waning career back on track. But an album as easy on the ear as this, with trite tales and often banal lyrics, is not likely to make any sort of impact. Well, one would hope not anyway.
Scott Kara
