Album review: Robbie Williams: Take the Crown

HIS latest album title suggests Robbie Williams is seeking someone to relieve him of his pop prince burden. Given the quality, that shouldn’t be hard.

Robbie Williams: Take the Crown

Island, £12.99

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Does the ambiguous title of Robbie Williams’ new album refer to a pugnacious putsch? Or is it a plea for someone else to assume the burden of pop prince? Listening to the album – the latest in a line of several purported “comeback” efforts – it’s difficult to tell.

Williams has always been an ambivalent pop star, bipolar in his oscillation between insecure neediness and confrontational confidence, with little space devoted to exploring any of the subtleties in between. The days when he was toppermost of the poppermost have passed. Williams has been supplanted, but not by some male pretender. Like Beyoncé says, it’s the women who run the pop world at the moment.

In private, he may have accepted that his pop star days are behind him, and a potentially lengthy career as a light entertainer lies ahead. He’s something of an establishment figure these days, though he doesn’t wear those robes as willingly as Gary Barlow, who admitted him back into the Take That fold at a time when Robbie needed them more than they needed Robbie.

But the bratty quest to prove the doubters wrong continues, coupled with that constant need for affirmation. “They said the magic was leaving me – I don’t think so,” he sings near the start of Take The Crown. Despite the defiant words, there is not much conviction behind them. He doesn’t exactly come out swinging on Be A Boy, with its banal mix of 1980s sax and keyboard sounds, and Coldplay-style terrace “oh-wehs”.

Williams has been bouncing around collaborators ever since the dissolution of his chart-busting songwriting relationship with Guy Chambers. Take The Crown has been co-written with Australian dance duo The Undercolours and helmed by U2/Snow Patrol producer Jacknife Lee, if you’re interested. But there’s no stamp of ownership on this recording.

Instead, Williams wanders around sampling from a tepid buffet of sounds. Gospel has traces of a US AOR feel to its verses. The song is principally a declaration of commitment but he can’t resist a token Tourettes-like “go f*** yourself” to the naysayers.

Candy, that infuriating nursery rhyme of a single, is a gaudy stick of confection, co-written with his old frenemy Barlow. The lyrics are mainly nonsense, but the line “if you don’t feel good, what are you doing this for” sticks out like an awkward note to himself.

Who knows what the intention behind Shit On The Radio is – to satirise inanity on the airwaves, or merely to add to it? He certainly achieves the latter with the glorified cheerleader chant and processed glammy guitar of Hey Wow Yeah Yeah.

However, a mindless pop hook is arguably preferable to the swath of anonymous MOR numbers in the middle of the album. Marriage and fatherhood may account for these unlovable efforts to grow up and grapple with relationships, but Williams has a long way to go if he is to surpass the mature pop peak of Feel.

His new single Different resembles the faux angsty stadium blah which has powered Take That’s comeback (the irony being that the relative oddity of their Progress album means Take That now sound more transgressive than their prodigal son). “This time I’ll be different, I promise you, this time I’ll be special” beseeches Williams. It turns out that just saying it isn’t enough.

All That I Want is even worse, recalling the garishly over-produced pop/rock of second division 1980s acts such as Go West and Climie Fisher, with its impotently revving guitars and tinny keyboards. Hunting For You is strained from the vocals down, while the sub-Coldplay, sub-sub-U2 stadium shimmer of Into The Silence comes across as empty posturing. Williams just doesn’t have the goods, either vocally or emotionally, to pull off this style, but he retrieves his mojo slightly on the powering Not Like The Others. Instead of Robbie against the world, it’s Robbie and significant other against the world.

The closing cover of the country pop ballad Losers, originally by American duo The Belle Brigade, sticks out like a sore thumb. Williams has presumably found something in the lyric which rings true because, while his guest co-vocalist Lissie sounds reassuringly laidback, he is busting a gut, uncomfortably so, over lines such as “I don’t wanna die knowing that I spent so much time when I was young just trying to be a winner, so I wanna make it clear now, I wanna make it known, that I don’t care about any of that shit no more”.

His protest is unconvincing – as is the vast majority of the below-par material on this album.