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This is not an album edited by a pop superstar who has just signed the most juicy contract in British record history. Robbie Williams has just received a hundred and twenty million dollars from EMI for four albums. Escapology, the first one after such obscenity should at least be obliging: what complaints can Robbie Williams have?

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Escapology is a bitter, ironic, depressive album. Its author doesn't sound like he wants to praise his privileged position, but contrarily to brutally expose what being Robbie Williams entails.

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It's a smart, web-done record. Pop doesn't need more than that. But the lyrics cause surprise and rejection. If this is another facet of the construction of character Robbie, then it's unexpected. True, many little pop stars are choosing the "confessional" path, but this is no "confession", it's vomit, it's broadside. Industry has created a monster, Robbie seems to be saying, and I'm going to tell you about it. And he does. "Feel" is the first track. It's a romantic song, but goes... "Come and hold my hand/I wanna contact the living/Not sure I understand/This role I've been given/I don't want to die/ But I ain't keen on living either/ I scare myself to death/That's why I keep on running/Before I've arrived/ I can see myself coming (...)

A little introspection and self-criticism is aceptable for a pop artist, but this resentment, this biting the hand that fed him is either genius, cynicism or madness. Escapology is an almost self-destroying album. It's also the most complex mainstream pop album of the year. The surface of nice and sometimes beautiful songs combined with a litany of despite towards himself and his circumstances are irresistible. It can be unbearable if we return to our first question: what's Robbie Williams complaining about? But believing that he ignores the rejection it can cause is underestimating him.

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What will happen if the former boy band guy, ambitious and acid, who knows all the industry's ins and outs, reaches the mega stardom? Maybe then he can finally rest and enjoy himself in his swimming pool and his mansion in Bel Air. And maybe then he'll stop editing such bitter and at the same time accessible records as Escapology.

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Robbie Williams is the perfect product of the machinery he depends on, he loves, he despises, the machinery that's already a part of him, and that he represents in all its brutality. He's never naive enough to try and "get out of it" and proclaim his "authenticity". He couldn't live outside it, he seems to say, and nobody could live inside it. The last song, the only one written without the collaboration of his eternal and talented co-composer (the ever-in-the-shadows Guy Chambers) is dedicated to his grandmother, who has just died. It's sad and naive: "And now she lives in heaven/But I know they let her out/To take care of me". And thus the album ends, with Robbie Williams on his own, only accompanied by a ghost.