Rufus Wainwright – Release the Stars
Spend enough time channeling Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall, as Rufus Wainwright did during a series of 2006 concert dates, and you too may find yourself making the most florid album of your career as a result. And if you’re Wainwright, for whom floridity is as natural as air, this is really saying something.
Wainwright’s early releases favored vinegary and spry cabaret pop-style numbers that managed to get out of their own way, but his recent albums have been lumbering monuments to gilt, none more so than his latest, the occasionally great, occasionally draggy folk-meets-Wagner-meets-chamber-pop-meets-a-lot-of-other-things Release The Stars.
It’s often hard to tell whether the indiscriminate piling-on of harmonies, strings and random operatic flourishes — not to mention the mini-monologue from Sian Phillips (I, Claudius) on the otherwise unremarkable “Between My Legs” — overwhelms what Wainwright is trying to say, or if it is what Wainwright is trying to say. It’s probably no accident, though, that the gravest and most important track, “Going To A Town” (“I’m going to a town that has already been burned down/I’m so tired of you, America”) is one of the sparest things here.
“Why does it always have to be chaos?” Wainwright asks on the opening “Do I Disappoint You”, which features, among other things, a dozen-plus horn and string players and his sister, Martha. Listeners may be wondering that themselves.