CD Review: Rufus Wainwright: Release the Stars

[KiwiCoromandel]

In the album's opening song, Do I Disappoint You?, Rufus Wainwright asks a lover, "Why does there always have to be fire? Why does there always have to be brimstone?" Listening to this far from minimalist sonic landscape, those who have not succumbed to the peculiar charms of the rakish Canadian-American may have similar questions. Why does there always have to be drama? Why do there always have to be flourishes? Because he can? Because he does it so well?

The simple answer is because it works. Wainwright's fifth album has flourishes that make no apologies for their roots in music written before Elvis shook his hips. It has melodic percussion and caressing strings, bringing not just colour but emotional depth and contrast. It deploys orchestras just as comfortably as harp glissandos and then throws all the light onto Wainwright's pliant tenor.

At times it also delivers guitars and pushy rhythms in a manner suggesting what the Pet Shop Boys might have sounded like backed by Elton John's 1970s band. It pairs an arch narration from one Pet Shop Boy, Neil Tennant, with a rich flugelhorn in one song; in another, it matches acoustic bass with a Herb Alpert-like trumpet.

In Leaving For Paris it sighs, in Nobody's Off the Hook it soothes and in the title track it vamps.

It is not, then, the stripped-down album Wainwright (foolishly? optimistically?) promised. But it is never weighed down. There is an attractive likeness to its tread even as you discover more and more elements in the background with each listen. This is an album that rewards headphone listening.

The easy strut of Between My Legs ("I will shed a tear between my legs" is the provocative chorus hook) and the gorgeous summer-breeze-turning-cool of I'm Not Ready To Love are a study in contrasts but both arrive so attractively that at first you are dazzled, then charmed and finally seduced. To follow the latter with Slideshow, a croon of shimmery delicacy, and then the Berlioz-in-Hollywood of Tulsa, a droll, modern take on Cole Porter-style lyrics about a night in an Oklahoma bar with Killers singer Brandon Flowers (cheekily described as tasting like "'potato chips in the morning"), serves only to emphasise that Wainwright is a seriously good songwriter.

Having also produced and arranged this album, he could easily have slipped into excess - he is no stranger to indulgence - but there's nary a false step.

By contrast with the two Want albums of 2003 and 2004, this is not as bracingly personal, though the politics remain with the blunt criticism of American social and political conservatism in Going To a Town. Nor does it reach some of the gloriously outrageous peaks (and occasional dips) of those albums. It is marginally more accessible, though I never saw Want and Want Two as something only for the cognoscenti: a good song is a good song is a good song.

But Release the Stars is a consistently impressive, satisfying collection of the kind of flamboyant pop music that few people have the courage or the talent to attempt, let alone succeed with. He's all right, that Rufus Wainwright.

Artist: Rufus Wainwright

Genre: Pop, Alternative/Indie

Label: Universal

source:AP/Bernard Zuel

image:Supplied: Release the Stars...Consistently impressive and satisfying...Rufus Wainwright is no stranger to indulgence but here there's nary a false step.