Spare a thought for All Saints. No, come on, try. Last week, their comeback album, Studio One, limped into the charts at No 40. Think of what the reconstituted quartet have been through recently: the teeth-gritting, the pride-swallowing, the mental strain of keeping a straight face as you doggedly insist that you're "doing it for the fans". All that effort, and you're outsold by singing bin man Andy Abraham.
Studio One's fate provides a lesson in the dangers of reformed pop bands releasing new material. Despite their recent tour's vast success, a cloud of doubt hovers over Take That's comeback album. For all the inarguable brilliance of their singles, Britain's best-loved boyband were hardly renowned as masters of the long-playing musical statement. Who today listens to the bits between the hits? Does anyone still ponder the imponderable lyrics of Take That and Party's title track ("don't catch the fall when I play real hard")? Who fast-forwards past I Found Heaven to enjoy its thought-provokingly titled B-side, I'm Out?
Meanwhile, Beautiful World's credits hardly inspire you to dig out the bunting and streamers. Among the reasons Take That are still regarded so fondly is that they embodied the appealing wonkiness of British pop. Their image was predicated on Carry On sauciness. Their early singles were the handiwork of Blackpool's Ian Levine, roly-poly inventor of cheerfully tacky 80s gay-club sub-genre Hi Nrg and, rumours persist, inspiration for the Abzorbaloff monster played by Peter Kay in Dr Who. Rather charmingly, something of the end-of-the-pier whiff clung to Take That even after fame and wealth arrived: the ex-members were still wont to make guest appearances in cosy Sunday night comedy-dramas or croon easy listening standards with Jonathan Wilkes, recently to be found starring in Mother Goose at Stoke-on-Trent's Regent Theatre.
But for Beautiful World, Take That have called upon songwriter/producer John Shanks, whose specialities are clinical, orthodontically corrected US pop (Ashlee Simpson, Lindsay Lohan, Hilary Duff) and the kind of drab AOR that sells millions (Anastacia, Alanis Morissette, Bonnie Raitt) - but never to anyone you've actually met.
Other changes are afoot. As befits the reduced circumstances of a man who quickly went from being tipped for global megastardom to being upstaged by Bill "Selwyn Froggitt" Maynard on Heartbeat, Gary Barlow has ceded his role as Take That's musical supremo: all the band members contribute to songwriting. Ironically, the end result sounds less like Anastacia or Ashlee Simpson than the polished pop-rock Robbie Williams recently seems to have abandoned. (Odder still, Wooden Boat sounds like recent Williams collaborator Stephen Duffy's band the Lilac Time). Occasionally, you see why Williams has tired of this sound, its brash choruses decorated with subtle references to classic rock (Strawberry Fields Forever on the single Patience) and currently voguish trends (falsetto vocals and echoing Coldplay guitars). The ballads are frequently so boring that one briefly recants meting out such harsh treatment to Rudebox: better Robbie Williams repeatedly shouting "I've got a bucket of shit!" than I'd Wait For Life, which makes hanging on for an unrequited love to realise her mistake and rush to your side sound no more gripping than waiting for the British Gas engineer to have a look at your boiler.
But Beautiful World lands more punches than a cynic might expect. The title track and Reach Out are dazzlingly effective pop songs. There are a handful of unexpected twists, hints of the old wonkiness that seem to have escaped their producer's notice: the folky Wooden Boat, the ersatz psychedelia of What You Believe In, and Shine, which matches Beatley pop to Scissor Sisters glitz.
That the latter track is Beautiful World's solitary moment of camp excess is enough to give at least one listener pause for thought. In the mid-90s, Take That's best records offered a radically different reading of musical history to Oasis' classic rock orthodoxy: one that favoured disco and the Bee Gees' perfect pop confections over the thudding bloke-rock of Slade and the Jam; one that lauded Barry Manilow's songwriting skills long before Guilty Pleasures or the Feeling were invented; that suggested sexual ambiguity might be more interesting than new laddism.
In 2006, Take That sound almost indistinguishable from post-Britpop mainstream rock: you can imagine Keane or James Blunt performing most of the songs here, albeit with substantially more bluster and substantially less charm. You can't deny that Take That have identified with devastating accuracy the kind of thing that grown-up former teenyboppers like nowadays - not for them the grim fate of All Saints. Nor can you really expect four thirtysomething men with any sense of personal dignity to once more climb into their PVC chaps and g-strings. But for all Beautiful World's polish, it's hard not to think that Take That might have lost something fundamental to their appeal along the way.
