Posted October 20, 200618 yr Independent reviews: Album: Robbie Williams Rudebox, EMI Reviewed by Andy Gill Published: 20 October 2006 3 stars Heralded by the graceless title-track single, with its ghastly white-boy rapping ("Sing a song of Semtex/ Pocketful of Durex/ Party full of Mandrax/ Are we gonna have sex?"), Rudebox is Robbie Williams's putative dance album, at once a tribute to the electropop soundtrack of his youth and - in tracks like "Burslem Normals", "The Eighties" and "The Nineties" - a reflection on his life since. In general, it's best when the Pet Shop Boys are involved and worst when Robbie raps: even less appealing than "Rudebox" itself is "Keep On", a nonsense babble-rap of vocal bric-a-brac that incorporates a namecheck of the Wu-Tang Clan, doubtless to their eternal chagrin. Most of the CD falls between these poles, with spartan techno grooves beneath tracks like "Never Touch That Switch", "Kiss Me" and a cover of Lewis Taylor's "Lovelight". The album is top-heavy with smug celebrity self-referentiality - not just from Williams, but from his showbiz chums too: having the Pet Shop Boys produce and sing on a cover of My Robot Friend's "We're the Pet Shop Boys" must have seemed a terrific wheeze in the studio, but their further collaboration on "She's Madonna" rather gives the lie to its pay-off line "She's Madonna/ No man on earth could say that he don't wanna". Both tracks, however, have a sleek appeal absent from the rest of the album. There are moments of respite from the overall brittle, synthetic sheen. "Good Doctor", in which Robbie appears to blame his doctor for encouraging his drug habits, has a rumbustious Jamaican R&B flavour, while the agnostic anthem "Viva Life On Mars" employs an engaging blend of blues guitar, harmonica, banjo and hip-house groove. Less agreeable is his cover of Manu Chao's "Bongo Bong/ Je Ne T'Aime Plus", a limp slice of cod-reggae pop-soul. The album is, in musical terms, probably his most intriguing, but its biggest stumbling-block is Williams's lyrical pretensions. It's one thing to reiterate the Pet Shop Boys' reference to Yevtushenko's To the Finland Station, and another thing entirely to imagine one might usher a glimpse of insight into "The Eighties" through a collage of apparently random pop-culture references and biographical details. "Things are better when they start," he decides: "That's how the Eighties broke my heart." Things are certainly better than in "The Nineties", which means a recounting of the Take That story stuffed with self-justification and bruising insults aimed at his former bandmates. As the hidden track "Dickhead" suggests, bad-mouthing may turn out to be his most natural talent. DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Viva Life On Mars', 'Good Doctor', 'We're the Pet Shop Boys' Album: Meat Loaf Bat Out of Hell III - the Monster is Loose, MERCURY Reviewed by Andy Gill Published: 20 October 2006 2 stars "The Future Ain't What It Used To Be", claims a track on this third instalment of the Bat Out of Hell series. That's clearly contradicted by the album itself, which appears to have frozen musical time exactly as it was three decades ago, when the original appeared. Everything is essentially the same, just a bit louder and more bombastic - when lead guitar breaks are required, widdly dinosaurs such as Brian May and Steve Vai are trundled out, while the pseudo-operatic overtones are exaggerated by overblown arrangements employing the most clichéd notions of classical "majesty" - a Carmina Burana-style chorale on "Monstro", an angelic child chorister singing Latin counterpoint on "Seize the Night". Even poignancy is wielded like a cudgel, when Uillean pipes and Celtic harp join Loaf's maudlin vibrato on the climactic "Cry to Heaven". Loaf himself provides the perfect tag-line for the project in "Land of the Pigs" when he sings: "In the land of the pigs, the butcher is king/ Listen to the marketplace sing". DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Seize the Night', 'If It Ain't Broke, Break It' 1 to robbie, 0 to meat
October 20, 200618 yr Author Robbie Williams, Rudebox (EMI) Alexis Petridis Friday October 20, 2006 The Guardian 2 stars It is hard to think of a recent release that has incurred quite the level of negative pre-publicity afforded Robbie Williams' seventh album. Coming hard on the heels of a world tour that began with Williams offering refunds to the entire audience at the opening show and ended with the singer apparently announcing his retirement from live performance, Rudebox has been billed as incontrovertible proof that the previously unstoppable Williams juggernaut has developed engine trouble. Here, it has been intimated, is the sound of Robbie Williams' big end going: an album so peculiar, so spectacularly misconceived, that it will decimate his fanbase at a stroke. "What a bizarre, baffling and downright strange record this is," howled one august music magazine. Article continues -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Alas, would that Rudebox were that interesting. There are certainly moments when you wonder what on earth Williams thinks he's up to - not least a cover of world music star Manu Chao's novelty track Bongo Bong/Je Ne T'aime Plus that concludes with Williams doing a terrible impersonation of the French legend he recently namechecked in an interview as Serge Gainsborough - yet, for the most part, it turns out not to be bizarre, baffling or downright strange, but somehow inevitable. On his last album, Intensive Care, Williams' new co-writer Stephen Duffy apparently expunged the singer's desire to record the wretched jokey tracks that had peppered all his previous albums, like a musical equivalent of the tiresome array of gurns and knowing winks he employs onstage. Reviews were better, but in Britain at least, sales were not: the final single from Intensive Care, Sin Sin Sin, was the lowest-charting of Williams' career. The ensuing live dates, meanwhile, suggested that Williams' longing to be taken seriously as an artist and songwriter was precluded by his longing to perform Me And My Shadow à deux with Jonathan Wilkes, former presenter of ITV's You've Been Framed. Don't let Intensive Care fool you, seemed to be the message; I'm not done winking and gurning yet. And so it proves. Despite a stellar cast list, including the Pet Shop Boys, Lily Allen, New York hip hop DJ Mark Ronson and producer William Orbit, Rudebox is an album that doesn't stop winking and gurning at you for over an hour. It throws a lot of musical styles at the wall: R&B, 80s cover versions and electro among them. But every time one of them looks like sticking, every time it threatens to hit a note of affecting seriousness (the brilliant, icy meditation on fame's corrupting power that is She's Madonna, a cover of New York electro act My Robot Friend's We're the Pet Shop Boys - a glorious homage to the power of music - or The Actor's skewed, slightly disturbing synth-pop) it quickly starts making with the pop-eyes and funny face: "We're mad, innit?" as Williams exclaims at one juncture. This, it scarcely needs saying, proves fantastically irritating, not least because the funny face usually takes the form of a novelty hip-hop track, often featuring the uniquely depressing sound of a white multimillionaire pop star rapping in Jamaican patois. Good Doctor finds Williams doing a terrible north-western approximation of Mike Skinner's vocal delivery. It's the Coronation Streets. The kind thing to say would be that Rudebox exists in a long tradition of messy, risk-taking records that seem less like coherent albums than a kind of musical miscellany in search of an editor: the Beatles' White Album, Fleetwood Mac's Tusk and the Clash's Sandinsta! among them. But you feel fairly daft implying that Williams' limp cover of Stephen Duffy's 80s pop hit Kiss Me somehow drinks from the same stream of inspiration as Dear Prudence or Somebody Got Murdered, and, in any case, it's hard to think of a song more likely to curb the listener's generosity of spirit than Rudebox's closing "secret" track, Dickhead. A woeful sub-Eminem rant, it features Williams gallantly threatening to set his retinue of bouncers on anyone who dares to criticise his music. By the time it concludes, puzzlingly, with the singer shouting "I've got a bucket of $h!t! I've got a bucket of $h!t!", one feels less inclined to say the kind thing than the cruel thing: you don't need to tell me that, pal, I've just spent the last hour examining it. In truth, Rudebox doesn't deserve such opprobrium. If it's unlikely to confound fans of Captain Beefheart with its edginess and experimental verve, the mind still boggles at what Williams' core audience - the mums, the Heat readers, the couples who buy two CDs a year from Tesco - will make of it. A scant handful of highlights aside, it is packed with half-baked ideas, bad jokes, music that any other star of Williams' stature would be terrified of the general public hearing. Perhaps that's the point. If nothing else, Rudebox is a sharp reminder that Robbie Williams is unique. Meat Loaf, Bat Out of Hell III (Mercury) Caroline Sullivan Friday October 20, 2006 The Guardian 4 stars The singer the New York Times calls Mr Loaf has released eight studio albums, not counting this one, which will surprise those who thought there had been only two - Bat Out of Hell I and II. So completely has the Bat series dominated the big man's career, it's hard to name anything else he has done - a cameo as a bus driver in the Spice Girls film comes to mind - but those other six albums (including the most recent, Couldn't Have Said it Better in 2002, and Welcome to the Neighbourhood in 1995) are stubbornly unmemorable. It's not the fault of the albums themselves, but of the looming Bat shadow, which effectively cancels out everything else. Article continues -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Meat claims that III will be the last of the Bats, so, fittingly, it's the most ludicrous of all. Following a copyright lawsuit, this is the first album on which writer/producer Jim Steinman has played no active part (he has, however, contributed seven songs, including It's All Coming Back to Me Now, a 1996 hit for Celine Dion). Meat fills the void in two ways: by recruiting the most bombastic sidemen available (including Brian May, former Marilyn Manson guitarist John 5 and Motley Crue's Nikki Sixx) and by oiling up his vocal chords with the help of a singing coach, so that the sound they produce is unsurpassably huge and operatic. For what it's worth, there's a loose narrative thread (the "monster" - war, famine, pestilence - is on the loose, so you might as well stay at home with a Meat Loaf album), but that's peripheral to the record's main purpose, which is to indulge Meat's love of gothic vaudeville. He pours on the melodrama from the start, and if "melodramatic" could just as well describe the first two Bat albums, the difference here is that the hysteria is notched up to a barely feasible degree. Meat is 58, and as he blasts out the bell-ringing, choir-filled arias entitled Blind as a Bat and Bad for Good (the latter featuring a hell-for-leather Brian May), you fear for his blood pressure. Those, however, are nothing compared with Land of the Pigs (The Butcher is King) - five Olympian minutes crying out for a full production at Glyndebourne - and the duet (with Norwegian singer Marion Raven) It's All Coming Back to Me Now, ostensibly a reflection on love, but imbued with the delicacy of aircraft carriers colliding at sea. The whole thing is, of course, ridiculous. But Meat's beat manifesto should be treasured as the last chapter of a remarkable rock trilogy. 1 to robbie, 1 to meat
October 20, 200618 yr Author other scores: Sun robbie - 3 out of 5, meat - 4.5 out of 5 Q - robbie - 2 stars, meat - 4 stars so up to now 1 to robbie, 3 to meat
October 20, 200618 yr Well the Sun's reviews are a joke. I mean they only gave Oasis's brilliant last album 3 stars <_< They're have been countless brilliant reviews for Robbie from proper papers/mags. http://www.buzzjack.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=19098
October 20, 200618 yr tbh, I think, as much as I hate them, My Chemical Romance will outsell Meat Loaf <_<
October 20, 200618 yr Author Well the Sun's reviews are a joke. I mean they only gave Oasis's brilliant last album 3 stars <_< They're have been countless brilliant reviews for Robbie from proper papers/mags. http://www.buzzjack.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=19098 thats a bit dumb isnt it, as you click on there and it takes you to the Q magazine review where they give it a worse mark :lol:
October 20, 200618 yr thats a bit dumb isnt it, as you click on there and it takes you to the Q magazine review where they give it a worse mark :lol: :lol: Well that was the first review availble. The rest are mostly great
October 22, 200618 yr Author The telegraph have given both reviews but they don't give stars <_< try sunday telegraph
October 22, 200618 yr Author meatloaf is a joke of an artist and in no way anywhere near as good as robbie well from the reviews of rudebox what with comedy rapping and the 'look its my mate johnathan wilkes' interludes in his shows, pros the same can be said at some point for robbie as well ps. meat was great in fight club
October 22, 200618 yr im really looking forward to th enew meatloaf album and i love his new single, i didnt like rudebox by robbie and i dont like lovelight either so i dont think i will buy the album
October 22, 200618 yr im really looking forward to bat out of hell 3 its got some great reviews so far so i hope it lives up to my expectations
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