Album: Robbie Williams

Escapology, Parlophone

It will be a mordant irony if Robbie Williams's absurd £80m deal with EMI winds up ruining the British music industry, as the overwhelming impression given by Escapology is of someone desperate to leave behind his parochial roots and inveigle his way into American hearts. Unfortunately, there's not much here to seduce them on a musical level, as whichever style Williams adopts – from the ersatz soul of "Something Beautiful" and "Revolution" to the Pixies pastiche of "Song 3" to the nu-metal manqué of "Handsome Man" and "Cursed" – simply sounds like a diluted version of something America already does for itself with far greater authenticity and conviction. For all his craven fawning and cajoling in embarrassing love-letters to Los Angeles such as "Hot Fudge" and "Song 3", he's just too MOR to attract much attention in a land that already has its own mainstream icons, and its own ex-boy-band singers, such as Justin Timberlake, graduating to the solo arena (with, it must be said, rather more contemporary character to their music). If only they shared Robbie's apparently boundless fascination with himself, then the bumptiousness of lines like "Give in and love it, what's the point in hating me?/You can't argue with popularity" might not offer such hostages to fortune. As it is, the much-vaunted and supposedly loveable cheekiness that is his stock-in-trade has curdled, in song after song here, into an arrogant cynicism that's rather less appealing. So, although Escapology will undoubtedly sell millions across the UK and Europe, it's unlikely to increase the affection in which he's held at home. As if he cares.