ilikemusic.com Review Intensive Care

Quoted from: http://www.ilikemusic.com/

' "I'm a huge fan of 'The Lilac Time,' so I thought I'd spend a couple of days writing some folk songs with Stephen Duffy, just for a change.' (Robbie Williams)

Two years of continuous writing and recording later, Robbie Williams returns with 'INTENSIVE CARE', his eighth album which is OUT NOW -released on Monday 24th October 2005.

'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."

ut the mood isn't uniformly melancholic here. The first single, 'Tripping' (to be released Monday 3rd 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.

Click here to WATCH Tripping VIDEO

For the first time, Robbie Williams will be launching his album with a live show outside of the UK. The concert will take place in the heart of Europe at Velodrom, Berlin on October 9th. The show is a one off, never to be repeated special which will be filmed for the first ever Europe wide cinecast in high definition and surround sound, with TV broadcasts to follow.

The film of this show is the latest in a series of extraordinary spectaculars, starting with ‘Live At Slane Castle’, followed by 'Live At Manchester', 'Live at The Albert' and finally and not least of all 'Live at Knebworth'. Tickets for the Velodrom go on sale on September 5th and tickets for the cinecast go on sale on September 9th.

TRACK BY TRACK

Ghosts - Throughout the recording of 'Intensive Care', Robbie was revisiting a lot of his favourite songs from the 1980s, particularly the Human League's 'Louise', about a man who sees a former lover at the bus stop and realises he still has deep feelings for her. With 'Ghosts', Robbie wanted to write Louise's response, and so this freewheeling melody is drenched in lost-love pinings and the very sweetest melancholy. The vocal harmonies in the chorus, meanwhile, which are almost hymnal, enhance its emotional clout exponentially.

Tripping - Erroneously described in the press as Robbie Williams' reggae song, 'Tripping's' rolling rhythm actually owes a greater debt to the early work of The Clash. "It's something like a mini gangster opera," Robbie says, "Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch combined." The chorus features a tight-trousered falsetto that climbs the scales like a fireman climbs a ladder, and almost touches disco on its lofty ascent. The first single to be lifted from 'Intensive Care' and, alongside 2004's 'Radio', one of his more idiosyncratic creations.

Make Me Pure - 'Make Me Pure', as Robbie will tell you and producer Stephen Duffy will confirm, is a song without a chorus, "just six or seven verses, and a bit at the end." This is the singer in conversation with himself, a 31 year-old man off the drink and drugs but wanting, nevertheless, to push the barriers of his newly-found sobriety, and to still have occasional illicit fun. "It's also about turning 30 and realising that there is still a big void in my life," he says. "And that's a woman, a partner, a wife." Heartache clearly suits him, for this fabulous song.

Spread Your Wings - 'Spread Your Wings', a lyrical sister to the opening 'Ghosts', finds Robbie in nostalgic mood once more, returning, in spirit, to his native Stoke-on-Trent and a girlfriend of old. Celebrating the 1980s, it name checks the long-forgotten Oran Juice Jones and Jocelyn Brown, and suggests that we shouldn't "let the dreams out of your head". His motivation for this one? "I want to write songs that will still break peoples' hearts in 20 years time," he says. "And I hope, and reckon, this one will do just that."

Advertising Space - Perhaps the most conclusive confirmation that the pairing of Robbie Williams and Stephen Duffy was a wise one, 'Advertising Space' possesses wraparound majesty, and is almost profoundly cinematic. "This is my 'True Romance' song," he says, "the one where, like Christian Slater in the film, I like to believe I have direct access to Elvis Presley every now and then." Elegiac and mournful, it describes a superstar's tragic fall from grace. Robbie jokingly describes it as his own 'Candle In The Wind'. It's not, of course. It's less cheesy by a full Edam, for starters.

Please Don't Die - "I would never presume to know how it feels to lose a loved one," Robbie says, but 'Please Don't Die', by far the most poignant moment on the album, concerns a family member who died of cancer last year. An intimately personal lyric about love, memory and honour, this features the flipside of Robbie Williams, one a million miles away from the persona who sang 'Rock DJ'. "Look around, there's no one here to love me, hold me," he sings in a very quiet and very tender voice.

Your Gay Friend - Starting with a jubilant "whoo hoo", 'Your Gay Friend' is Intensive Care's most frivolous moment, and also its most mischievous. "I'll be your gay friend/Cos your marriage never ends/so we fuck and fight again," he sings. Its author declines to say who the song's subject is about - "the less said about that the better". Its Lucozade spritz is as infectious as its lyrical content is potentially contentious.

Sin Sin Sin - One of the first efforts Robbie wrote with his new songwriting partner Stephen Duffy, 'Sin Sin Sin', with its metronomic beat, is an engagingly hypnotic song about a dirty old man who craves a shag. "Basically," Robbie grins, "it's about the kind of bloke I will turn into myself one day." Despite its sly content, this features his most mannered vocal to date, reminiscent of Pet Shop Boys' Neil Tennant, but with even finer annunciation. His mother would be proud; Stephen Duffy already is. "As soon as we'd completed this track," Duffy says, "I thought we might just have a future together."

Random Acts Of Kindness - 'Random Acts' is a song about magic. In the two years Robbie worked on 'Intensive Care', he also found the time to develop an interest in magic and the occult, studying the published works of occultist Aleister Crowley and dabbling in spells of his own. He likes to describe this particular song as "mystical and magical", one made for the inner Gandalf in us all. "I am just a simple man with simple expectations," he sings, perhaps somewhat disingenuously.

The Trouble With Me - It is, by now, common knowledge that few people write self-lacerating songs with the unflinching eloquence of Robbie Williams, and 'The Trouble With Me' is one of his very best. Written by a man of maturity now desperate to find the woman of his dreams, he begins it thus: "You see the trouble with me/I've got a head full of fuck/I'm a basket case/I don't think I can love." Stephen Duffy, the album's producer, points to these lyrics - which, like all of Robbie's lyrics, come straight off the top of his head with the minimum of architecture - as confirmation of his genius wordplay.

A Place To Crash - 'A Place To Crash', Robbie says with no little pride, is the only Rolling Stones riff Keith Richards has yet to write, and so Stephen Duffy wrote it instead. Cocksure, robust and possessed of a swagger that suggests it was born in leather trousers, this brash anthem is undoubtedly a future live favourite, its "AH YEAHs!" tailor-made for a full stadium singalong. After one minute and 29 seconds, Robbie shouts "GUITAR!" He's not done that before.

King of Bloke And Bird - The final song on 'Intensive Care' is also the most maudlin, a profoundly affecting acoustic paean to the futility of searching for love, Robbie casting himself here as disaffected and dejected. Its poignancy is, at times, unbearable, its lip tremors genuinely affecting. At the time of writing, Robbie reckons he won't be playing this song live as it is simply "too painful". But catch him on another day, and he is much more positive about it. "This is me trying to imitate Neil Young but sounding, instead, like Kermit the Frog," he says. Miss Piggy should be so lucky... '