In these days of shrinking markets and shattered business models, there are some artists for whom the big-numbers pop machine still works, or so Robbie Williams and his record company are nervously hoping. Three years after the comparatively disappointing sales of Rudebox Williams has gone into overdrive to make Reality Killed the Video Star his eighth No 1 album in a row.

While his UFO-obsessed exile in California may have left Williams a bit out of sync with the modern pop world — witness his saucer-eyed foray into the X Factor bearpit — nothing has been left to chance in the making of this record. There are six writers (including Williams) credited with composing the opening track, Morning Sun, an engaging but undemanding Elton John-type piano ballad with gradually escalating Beatles-style strings. And it apparently took five people to write Somewhere, a song lasting just over a minute with a lyric not much longer than a haiku.

With the songs safely through the committee stage, the studio performances were delivered to Trevor Horn, a man with all the approved credentials to produce an old-fashioned blockbuster. The resulting recording is clean and big, a panoramic soundscape, but always with the voice close to the front of the mix.

With all this activity going on around him, Williams adopts his preferred position — centre stage — with practised ease. The songs — some happy, but most strangely sad — are all about him and his place in the Universe, with lyrics that are alternately self-glorifying and self-pitying. “I can't help thinking about me/ I’m the genius behind me,” he sings in Superblind, a number that begins as a wistful ballad but soon adds gusty layers of power guitar chords and swirling strings. Elsewhere, things don’t sound so good. “I've been bleeding lately, internally,” he complains in Blasphemy, another piano and string-driven number, co-written with Guy Chambers, in which Williams contemplates a sea of troubles including the onset of “great depression” and, prematurely, “senile dementia”.

But despite the deft and often dark wordplay — as in the hit single Bodies — there is something safe and ultracalculated at the heart of this album that undermines the needy, nervy egotism that continues to sustain Williams as a front-rank star. He’s not on the skids yet, but the days when a new Williams album was accompanied by the sound of champagne corks popping are starting to seem a little distant.

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