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Robbie Williams – Reality Bites

Robbie Williams has spent the last couple of years living it large in LA or wandering across the lands in search of aliens. Clearly LA got too much and the alien hunting proved fruitless, because he’s back with his first album since 2006’s mishmash, Rudebox.

When I heard the first single, Bodies , earlier this year, I was impressed. It was a grower, but it had a good heavy sound and was a different spin on recent pop tracks. I was immediately excited about the prospect of a quality Robbie album.

My excitement was misplaced, as Reality Killed the Video Star is less than impressive. Robbie is trying desperately to get back to the roots of his solo success, so much so that Reality is more like a self-parody than a fresh new album. For me, Bodies is the best song on the album – it stands out as different in the midst of poor copies of his previous work.

There’s three types of Robbie song, as far as I can see. There’s his pleasant piano ballads, which made him his name – Angels, She’s the One, etc. There’s type two – the electropop tracks such as No Regrets and She’s Madonna (much of Rudebox, in fact). Then there’s the third more raucous type – the soft rock tracks such as Kids, Rock DJ and Let Me Entertain You. When putting together Reality, these song types seems to have been analysed in order to produce a by-the-book Robbie Williams album.

Morning Sun begins the album and fits neatly into type one. It could have been a track on Life Thru a Lens. You Know Me and the lyrically awful Blasphemy follow this pattern. Last Days of Disco and the slightly catchy Difficult for Weirdos fall into type two and just leave me wanting to scour the star’s back catalogue rather than continue listening to this pale imitation of his glory days. The harder ‘novelty’ tracks (type three) are represented by Bodies and Do You Mind? and neither truly set the world alight.

The album isn’t terrible. It’s just not very interesting. There’s no obvious pop hits, which is a big negative point for a pop album by a pop star. My advice: if you’re a Robbie Williams fan, avoid this album and go back to Life Thru a Lens, I’ve Been Expecting You and Sing When You’re Winning (if it’s later in the evening and you fancy a glass of Brandy, then stick on Swing When You’re Winning for a change of pace).

Reality Killed the Video Star is nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is. The juvenile lyrics and the copy-and-paste tunes make me wish Robbie had stuck to searching for aliens in Los Angeles.

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