For those of you that follow British tabloids, you’d know that Robbie Williams has had a well-documented breakdown in the public eye for the past five years.
Unlike our American sweetheart, Britney Spears, he doesn’t bow out to technological robotics in between trips to the psych ward. He still makes music.
His latest, “Reality Killed the Video Star,” doesn’t have the umph or new millennium pathos of “The Ego Has Landed” or the fabulous electro-Timberlake bounce of 2006’s “Rudebox,” but it’s still got somethin’ special.
In less than 50 minutes, Williams manages to record a disc filled with realistic, sobering studies of sex, love, fame, God and self-image.
In “You Know Me,” a malt-shop, doo-wop charmer, Williams croons about just how much he values relationship co-dependency with the refrain “Since you went away / my heart breaks every day.”
In “Last Days of Disco,” amid swirling strings and groovy basslines, there is still an undertone of the uncertainty of music’s future, even as he cries defiantly, “Don’t call it a comeback / Look what I invented here.”
On this CD, Williams has invented magic — without the help of Auto-Tune.
Reality revives the pop star
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