Rating:
Genre:
Rock
Release Date: 05/15/2007
If ever there was an artist that embodied both the urbane popular songsmithing of
Cole Porter and the epic winged grandeur of
Richard Wagner it is
Rufus Wainwright. Having not so much perfected as succumbed to this yin-yang pull on his laboriously ambitious and intermittently inspired 2003 and 2004 albums
Want One and
Want Two,
Wainwright once again delivers a
baroque collection of songs on 2007's
Release the Stars. Recorded at least partially in Berlin and London with
Pet Shop Boys lead
Neil Tennant, the album finds
Wainwright casting himself as a kind of expatriate torch singer, a veritable
Marlene Dietrich of emotion who, as he laments on
"Going to a Town," is "so tired of America." In that sense,
Release the Stars is at once intensely personal and utterly theatrical with
Wainwright playing both ingénue and femme fatale in a series of increasingly cinematic pop-operas about true love gone not so much bad, but sad. He pleads to make it to the other side of town, and possibly the other side of monogamy, with his brown-eyed lover in
"Tiergarten" and dreams lazily about, "the boys that made me lose the blues and then my eyesight" on
"Sanssouci." While these songs are lushly produced, often with full orchestration, and while
Wainwright has a knack for pretty, lilting melodies and concrete imagery there is nonetheless a distinct lack of
pop hooks here. In fact, only the chugging
T. Rex inspired
glam rock of
"Between My Legs" gets at any real
pop meat. The main problem is that it's never quite clear if
Wainwright, who has always been to
pop music as
cabaret is to Broadway, is dressing
opera up as
pop or vice versa. But when you wear custom Lederhosen as well as
Wainwright does throughout the album liner notes, does it really matter? [The CD was also released with a DVD.]
~Matt Collar, All Music Guide
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