Robbie Williams returns with Intensive Care

Quoted from: http://top40-charts.com

SYDNEY, AU. (EMI MUSIC AUSTRALIA)

- 'Intensive Care' was recorded in Robbie Williams' bedroom high in the Hollywood Hills and co-written with Stephen Duffy over the course of 24 months. In this time, the pair were wildly experimental, creating songs that sounded, variously, like Gang Of Four, Bloc Party and Kraftwerk, before finally settling on a style that they felt most comfortable with.
"Lyrically, this is the best album I've written," Robbie says, "although I do say that before every album comes out. But I think I mean it this time. Anyway, I'm very pleased with it, and very pleased with the way it worked out with Stephen [Duffy]. It's given me a whole new perspective on the future, as well." Ultimately, says its author, the album is inspired, at least in part, by the Human League's classic 1984 single 'Louise', about a man who sees his former girlfriend at a bus stop and realises that he still has strong feelings for her.
"It's one of my all-time favourite tracks," he says, "and I liked the idea of writing from Louise's point of view. And so several tracks on the album, things like 'Ghosts' and 'Spread Your Wings' in particular, run along similar themes, about ex-lovers who still yearn for one another. There's a lot of pining on this record, I think."
Identifiably the work of someone taking stock of his life - see 'Ghosts', 'Make Me Pure' and the mesmerising 'Advertising Space' - 'Intensive Care' is richly melancholic and steeped in nostalgia. While recording it, Robbie would revisit the key songs of his youth - everything from Oran Juice Jones' 'The Rain' to Prefab Sprout's 'When Love Breaks Down'.
"When I think about school and hear some of the songs from the 80s, it breaks my heart, it really does," he says. "But I think I might have finally purged myself of that, it might finally be out of my system, which is probably a good thing. But it's definitely been an influence in the making of this album. I wanted to write the kind of songs that could break somebody else's heart in 15, 20 years, and give them the same sense of nostalgia as my favourite songs gave me."
But the mood isn't uniformly melancholic here. The first single, 'Tripping' (to be released Sunday 2nd October 2005), is Robbie's attempt at a "mini gangster opera", all cocksure strut and disarming falsetto, while 'A Place To Crash' out-swaggers the Rolling Stones in pursuit of rock'n'roll hedonism.'