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Post by webm@ster on Dec 19, 2002 11:03:20 GMT -5
by David Sinclair When he released his first album in America Robbie Williams called it The Ego Has Landed. Nice joke, even if the Americans didn't buy it -or the album. But now that Williams is just about the biggest British pop star there is (in Britain, anyway) the ego has taken off again big time. Indeed, so inflated has Williams's image of himself become that it casts a shadow over his latest album, Escapology (Chrysalis/EMI).
"Hello, did you miss me?/ I know I'm hard to resist," he sings at the start of Handsome Man, a song which perfectly encapsulates the mixture of bumptiousness and insecurity that defines Williams's textbook exhibitionist personality. "It's nice to meet you/ Now let me go and wash my hand/ 'Cause you just met the world's most handsome man," he croons rudely and smugly, after boasting of his plan to milk his fame and good fortune "till it turns to cheese".
Taken as a whole, Escapology is another pretty good Robbie Williams album. With all the songs except one co-written with Guy Chambers, it marks a welcome return to the apparently effortless blend of arena-rock, vaudeville pop and blue-eyed balladry that was Williams's stock-in-trade before he started to have delusions of being Frank Sinatra.
The first single, Feel, is a good indication of what to expect. A catchy song with a pseudo-sensitive lyric built around one of Ronnie Scott's old jokes ("Let's all join hands and try to contact the living"), it sticks around like chewing gum. Love Somebody, Revolution and Sexed Up are similarly in-your-face love/pop songs with lots of mainstream resonance, while Monsoon is one of several full-on rock numbers in an Oasis/Manic Street Preachers mould with another gratingly self-absorbed lyric: "I smoked too many cigarettes/ I've had more blondes than brunettes/ I'm not expecting your sympathy/ But it's all been too much for me."
Oh Robbie, please, you're breaking my heart.
The main departure from previous Williams albums is the calculated targeting of the American market on songs such as Hot Fudge, sung in an Elton John-esque transatlantic drawl, and Me and My Monkey, a bizarre travelogue through the Mexican badlands complete with Tijuana brass arrangement and studied references to Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
It's all harmless fun and we Brits will soon be gratefully lapping it up from the palm of Williams's freshly washed hand. But he is now pitching so hard for success in America that a distinct air of desperation is beginning to creep into some of his more vainglorious pronouncements. In any event, it seems unlikely that the Americans will be seduced at this stage of the game by a bunch of shallow stories about driving down to Vegas in a jet-black Chevrolet or "moving out to LA" and, despite his best efforts, Williams seems destined to remain a big fish paddling around a little pool.
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