James Arden checks out the garage rockers latest album.
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The signs are that all stops have indeed been pulled out for Reality Killed the Video Star, with the production team headed by music industry veteran Trevor Horn (the album’s title refers to one of his few chart successes as a musician with The Buggles: ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’).
The album opener ‘Morning Sun’ certainly sets the pace musically, a gracefully falling ballad with a brilliantly judged song structure and expansive instrumentation. It precedes the bite of lead-single ‘Bodies’ where the lyrical overload of each verse is discharged into the orchestral sweep of the chorus, a satirical take on pop-culture.
Williams has spoken in great detail in recent interviews about his reconciliation with his former band-mates from Take That and it would be fair to say that some of that even seems to have crept into his song-writing; the waltzing ‘You Know Me’ (complete with bah-bah-bah-backing singers) and the playful ‘Won’t Do That’ both smell of classic Gary Barlow. It’s the brie of pop cheese.
The album takes a far more mellow turn with ‘Blasphemy’, a relic of the once prolific song-writing partnership between Williams and Guy Chambers. With a softly syncopated piano accompaniment, it’s a master class in combining simple but effective music with subtly intelligent lyricism. Playing skilfully with contrasting mood, as he does throughout the album, Williams then hurls us headlong into the guitar-heavy punk-pop-rocker ‘Do You Mind’. It seems like it’s been years since Robbie, or anyone else for that matter, as sounded so, well, fun! Embarrassingly fun.
The electro-dance influences from Williams’ Rudebox project are still present but since then he seems to have learnt to incorporate them into his songs as enhancements rather than features. It can be heard in the futuristic feel of ‘Difficult For Weirdos’ and the sailing fusion of strings and synthesisers in ‘Starstruck’ but it works best in ‘Last Days Of Disco’, a slow-burner that grows and grows until the final chorus gloriously rises through the texture like a phoenix from the flames.
But ultimately its Williams’ ever-impressive talent for lyrics that steals the show, a gift highlighted in the striking originality found in the subduing languor of ‘Deceptacon’. He grabs the attention right from the opening: ‘Microwave yourself today/Save you for a rainy day’.
It’s fair to say that Robbie’s career has had its fair share of hits and misses. What sets him apart from many other acts is that he’s taken the misses, learnt from them and used everything good about them to move forward artistically. In ‘Blasphemy’ he sings ‘No singles, just fillers’. To say this was an accurate description of Reality... would be unfair; it implies something about the quality of the individual songs that just isn’t so. But in advance of the album’s release Williams said that he wanted people “to forget about who they are and where they are for 50 minutes”; I did.
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