The flamboyant torch songs of Rufus Wainwright feel like jetsam from a dazzling alternative reality.
In Wainwright’s rococo otherworld, Busby Berkeley and Tin Pan Alley cast a languorous and lingering shadow. Overwrought emotion is respected artistic currency. And the Golden Age of Hollywood – the era of high-camp and brash musicals – abides in perpetuity.
His records offer a vision steeped in sepia and strewn with petals, chocolate-box extravagances adorned with orchestral flourishes and gusts of melodrama that threaten to sweep you to your knees. It is music best encountered in a lonely piano bar, accompanied by a scotch on the rocks and a heart brimming with loss.
Want Two, the 31-year-old Montreal-native’s deliriously overblown new album, hugs the extremes of the Wainwright world-view.
An air of retreating glamour lingers about the record like a too-sweet perfume. There are ennui-coated excursions into chamber- pop (‘Little Sister’, ‘The One You Love’) and sensual laments that grab hold until the listener can hardly breathe (‘The Art Teacher’, ‘Memphis Skyline’). In heaven, all hissy fits sound this way.
The project is ostensibly a companion piece to last year’s Want One but feels closer to a tear-away sibling. Want One traded in mannered ballads and was heralded – wrongly – as the album to finally break Wainwright, who has yet to catch the ear of the mass market despite the ebullient praise of, among others, Elton John and Neil Tennant (a predicament with which his father, the folk singer Loudon Wainwright, might empathise).
One cannot imagine Want Two vaulting Wainwright into the mainstream. The record’s beauty is initially close to overwhelming; its richness of melody as intimidating as it is lovely.
On ‘Gay Messiah’, a wistful, throwaway tune accompanies a tale of Christ reincarnated as a 1970s porn star, anointing his flock “in cum” on the steps of Studio 54. Daytime radio may want to give it a miss. The rest of us should wax devotional and swoon at the feet of Wainwright, a queer genius for strange times.