ALBUM OF THE WEEK
(BMG)
After film director Joel
Schumacher died last month,
Minnie Driver shared this anecdote. Another actress, loudly criticising her on set, griped that Driver’s performance was over the top. Glancing up momentarily from his newspaper, Schumacher said, ‘Oh, honey, no one ever paid to see under the top.’
Now there, surely, is a maxim Rufus Wainwright lives by. Never knowingly understated, he has devoted himself to the idiom of romantic extravagance. So don’t be alarmed to learn that Wainwright’s first collection of original material since 2012 is, by his own standards, rather subtle.
He has merely dialled things down from Extravagant to Lavish.
Wainwright’s music, in fairness, has never lacked for light and shade. Unfollow The Rules follows a musical tack that demands plenty of the former. It belongs in that curious branch of Americana variously practised by Harry Nilsson, Van Dyke Parks and Michael Nesmith; a music that sounds as if rock’n’roll never quite took off yet pop continued to evolve.
The Rufus Wainwright keynotes are all here: those purple velvet vocals, of course, the gliding, sometimes woozy strings, and the general air of wistful languor. It turns out they match this mode of music very well indeed. It quickly starts to feel like one of those records that has always been there and has simply been awaiting discovery. If this was the first Rufus Wainwright album you ever heard, it would surely seduce you as effortlessly as any he’s made.