Review Intensive Care

Quoted from: http://www.fans-supreme.de/

'by Paul Flynn
When Robbie Williams invited Attitude into his lovely Chelsea pad last year to participate in the new legendary How Gay Are You? questionnaire, he bounded over to his computer and played us a song that he had fashioned with his new song-writing spar, Steven Duffy (ask your granddad). It was called Your Gay Friend - geddit? - and Robbie was considering whether or not to include it on his next album. As he made merry with an air guitar, ciggie hanging delightfully and omnipresently from lip, it was easy to see where his new sessions had taken him. If his buddies Coldplay had essentially taken the component parts of the Echo and the Bunnymen sound of the very early 80s and made them mass, he was happy to do the same with Morrisey. To cement the nod to his errant idol, he'd added a touch of palare at the end, a clever little reference at which he by now excels. Your Gay Friend is the centrepiece of today's new Robbie Williams record, and the one bound to inaugurate the controversy around it.

The ghost of Mozzer is everywhere on this, Robbie's fifth full album of new material in an astonishing 10 year solo career. You can actually sing along to his old Smiths favourite Girlfriend In A Coma, during the introduction to the buoyant Spread Your Wings. A decade in and there is still no need to roll out the centenary edition of his debut - a la Oasis - to drum up support for the new record. Williams is now an old pro. What he does, he does singularly, and even with some heavy referencing running through the record - a lot of chiming guitars, whipcrack choruses and cunning wordplay - and a new Guy Chambers to buffer the chord sequences under his unique talent, he is an artist in roughly an arena of one where British pop music is concerned. The album declares itself with the typically bold and saucy opening line 'Here I stand victorious/ the only man to ever make you come', yet it immediately undercuts itself - whenever has Robbie's confidence been unmitigated? - and by the end of the album, on the deeply mournful King Of Bloke And Bird, he is singing 'from the chaos in my heart'. There is something deeply post-coital about the lyrical content of Intensive Care, but this is not a man nestling in a lover's arms, or kicking back with a fag. It is one standing naked by the windowsill and wondering what he's just done ('Look around: there's no-one here to love me/ hold me' he intones on Please Don't Die). There is a running tributary feel to an old teenage girlfriend on Ghosts and the aforementioned Spread Your Wings, but largely this is a man wondering what he should do in place of being in love. It can be heartbreaking. Musically, it's very much a case of 'Guy who?' as Duffy paves the way for a more roving, exploratory feel to the tunes, evinced most provocatively on the opening single Tripping, a record which doesn't but ought to include in parentheses: (Hard-Fi? Nope. This is how you do suburban ennui) as it rolls around the tin pan alleys of estate violence to a tricksy ska rhythm. The bhangra strings and falsetto chorus are just showing off, frankly. There's more: the big Christmas ballad is Advertising Space, there are echoes of New Order on Sin Sin Sin and if you want a Robbie hating himself choral escapade to beat up Coldplay's Fix You in the playground of 2005's pop supremacists, well, take a listen to Make Me Pure, his Robbie in Memphis moment. I think it is by now time to embrace Robbie Williams, unreservedly. It may be time to concede that where legends are concerned, he is ours.'