Review: Rufus Wainwright

Review: Rufus Wainwright

Rufus Wainwright 'Release The Stars': Aidin Vaziri | Since touching down nearly a decade ago with his spectacular debut album, Rufus Wainwright has been hooked on crystal meth, temporarily gone blind, gotten shipped to rehab by Elton John, played Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall, started work on an opera and, most unexpectedly, fallen in love. But even as his personal life has gone topsy-turvy, the son of folk singers Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle has grown only more determined musically. Rufus self-produced his fifth and latest disc, "Release the Stars" (with assistance from mixer Marius de Vries and executive producer Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys), and it's the closest he's come to capturing his original vision: a dramatic convergence of Verdi and the Velvet Underground, heavenly choirs and world-weary words, black-tie orchestras and Moroccan strings. It's not the sort of album that will draw in the casual listener (not with that love-it-or-hate-it voice, anyway) and, like everything after his first album, it's too uneven to be truly great. At the same time, it wouldn't be an understatement to call it Wainwright's most user-friendly offering yet, particularly in its more uncomplicated moments such as "Not Ready to Love" and "Going to a Town." The latter sees him take a pointed political turn with the lines, "You took advantage of a world that loved you well/ I'm going to a town that has already been burned down/ I'm so tired of you, America." But the album at large finds Wainwright mostly with his head in the clouds, either meditating over beautiful melodies like "Sanssouci" or dreaming up his personal lewd rock opera in "Between My Legs." If you didn't know any better, you might suspect he's finally gotten it together.