November 2016

Robbie Williams – The Heavy Entertainment Show | Album review

Robbie Williams returns to the pop scene after revisiting the 1930s with his international hit Balance on both sides. In The heavy entertainment show, he returns to his favorite arena of the docile and provocative britpop. This time the ‘bold comeback’, as opposed to 2012 Take the crown, sees co-writer and producer Guy Chambers by his side again, and with an explosion of confidence, they produce a retro-pop hodgepodge of epic proportions.

Unlike recent incarnations of contemporary pop stars like Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake, whose styles have evolved to become more nuanced and avant-garde, Williams goes back in time for the bombastic big band and bubbly rock’n’roll music of the years. 70. and 80. Songs like Heavy entertainment show and Sensational sound like the grand finale of a cheesy Broadway show, performed by a stage rock band.

Williams’ talent has always shone in his personal moments, which he made sure to include in this album with the added bonus of a Coldplay style number. When you know and the sincere David’s song, dedicated to his recently deceased manager. On the other hand, the bachelor Party like a Russian is an attempt at political satire – a topic quite removed from the league of former Take That members, especially when he targets a nation he has little or no personal knowledge of. While the music is certainly earworm material, it’s no surprise the singer explains in a recent interview on BBC Breakfast that the track was born out of a lack of songwriting ideas.

A refreshing exception, perhaps, to the album’s generally overcrowded sound, could be Crazy hotel, his collaboration with Rufus Wainwright. It’s a smoothly produced mix of cinematic blues, peppered with trippy tremolos, reverbs and weird dissonances – a dark digression from Williams’ usual bright pop style.

The heavy entertainment show cries out for attention, missing the impression he’s dying to give. What is the singer celebrating so powerfully, one might ask. Is he self-deprecating or blatantly bombastic when he sings, messianically, “Bathe in the light that I give”? Apparently the world has been looking for “a savior” and here it is, and “all the best die so quickly” – vanityingly, Williams tries to make up for the pop culture deaths of 2016 with perhaps a little too much enthusiasm.

Jennifer sanin

The heavy entertainment show comes out on 4^e November 2016, for more information or to order the album visit here.

Watch the video for Party like a Russian here:

RObbie Williams’ return to the pop fray earlier this year was, you may have noticed, conducted with his usual hesitation. First, he capitalized on his growing war of words with his new neighbor Jimmy Page by promising to dig a big hole in his backyard and fill it with “crap”; Then he offended the Russian oligarchy with the deliberately tasteless comeback single Party like a Russian; more recently he was found recounting to this diary his contacts with the occult and a debilitating dependence on minstrels.

It was hard not to see all of this without looking at who could reasonably be considered the heirs of Williams – the no-fly zone of the personality that is Olly Murs or the serious #RealMusic Zayn Malik – and concluding that we are at less better off to have Williams around. Whatever your take on the state of pop in 2016, it’s hard to imagine Ellie Goulding embarking on the New Cold War with her latest single.

But while Williams’ return was in many ways welcome, it was not without its drawbacks. Party Like a Russian was an example – it contained a half-raped dancehall-tinged verse, jokes imploring you to “have him as an oligarch” and a sample of Sergei Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights – best known to the eyes of eagle. cash diggers like, uh, the theme of the apprentice for 11 years. That pretty much ticked off a list of everything people who dislike Robbie Williams would need in a file that could be used to force them to confess.

Heavy Entertainment Show, billed as Williams’ big pop comeback (although it was also the case with Take the Crown in 2012, and the one before too, if memory serves), is not entirely filled with songs from novelty. Instead, it rocks from one thing to another, whether it’s MOR ballads, glam rock, or orchestral showtunes. The concept for the album came from Williams recalling his youth, when light entertainment shows had the power to unite millions of people who all watched the same thing together. Williams always liked to cover all the bases this way, but that’s especially the case here – there’s some slinky pop for the kids, a song called Motherfucker to remind you he’s a little nervous, a whiny for your mom (David’s song), a joke with a nod to your uncle (“The only thing they should check is my ass” in Hotel Crazy) and so on.

Guy Chambers, the songwriter who helped Robbie through his era of mega-hits – Angels, Feel, Let Me Entertain You etc – is on board, as he was with Swing Both Ways in 2013, but the songs that stand out here are those of other collaborators whose credits you don’t need to read to be able to detect their presence: Mixed Signals sounds like a Springsteen cartoon, because it’s written by the Killers, whose careers last. days sounds like a Springsteen cartoon; Pretty Woman is both as hooked and deceptively libidinous as a song co-written with Ed Sheeran could be; Sensitive, which comes closest to a trendy pop hit here, feeds on the playful ’80s us of producer Stuart Price.

Aside from those vaguely modern dabbles, Williams is content to stick to the sounds that have served him well in the past. Love My Life, which Williams hopes could pull off a similar trick to Angels, is a serious’ 90s piano ballad with self-help lyrics so mundane it could have featured on a Gary Barlow solo album ( “I love my life / I am powerful / I am beautiful / I am me”). Motherfucker, meanwhile, seems overly eager to replicate the breezy, overproduced guitar solos that have been draped over Oasis’ Be Here Now, an album that has spent two decades being mocked for its addiction to windy and windy guitar solos. overproducts. At least the latter is saved by a loud melody and the fact that it allows Williams’ character to shine at full blast. A song about her family’s history of mental illness and her worry that her son was also in pain could have been brutal or heartbreaking; in Williams’ hands it features a chorus that reads: “Your uncle sells drugs / Your cousin is a cutter / Your grandmother is a fluffer / Your grandfather is in the gutter / Your mother is a nutcase / We’re crazy motherfuckers. Yet with its touching fallout – “We all believe you’re going to break the chain” – it achieves a well-judged sentimentality that’s not so far off from something like David Bowie’s Kooks.

But the problem with Heavy Entertainment Show isn’t that it doesn’t have great songs – it’s that it’s hard to imagine who would want to listen to it in 2016. Williams’ dream of a performance experience mass shared with “something for everyone” just does not have. I can’t calculate in a world where the way we consume music has become so fragmented and personalized. Consequently, an album which opens with the confession that “he would sell my children / For a hit in Belgium” then takes the time of a sincere tribute to his late manager (David’s Song) before concluding as a finale on Broadway (“I love you all, auf wiedersehen!”), it’s just a mess. It is undeniable that no pop star other than Robbie Williams has been able to release a record like Heavy Entertainment Show. The question is, do we really need someone?

• This article was last modified on November 3. The song Love My Life had been wrongly attributed to writer Guy Chambers.