RUFUS WAINWRIGHT - All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu

Whether you like it or not, Rufus Wainwright is a gifted musician whose output remains one of the few examples of real artistic coherence. Skilled at balancing the role of popstar and introverted, sharp-witted singer-songwriter, and thoroughly engaging and charismatic in his live performances despite the touch of glamour surrounding his shows, Rufus has an intense, evocative voice that ties together the mesmeric power of Thom Yorke and Jeff Buckley with the classicism evoked by the most disparate corners of rock (from Muse to Elton John), all resting on a melancholic, romantic songwriting style that stirs up more sexuality than an erotic film.

Only once you're aware of this physical and cerebral communicative force of Rufus Wainwright can you fully understand the media buzz that accompanies every one of his releases; his emotional charge is closer to the sensual energy of Marvin Gaye than to the machismo of Bruce Springsteen. His music raises doubts rather than certainties, and instead of cradling hedonistic temptations, it digs into the loneliness and pain born of other people's indifference.

In this sense, "All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu" is the triumph of music as an expression of an otherwise inscrutable inner reality. Rufus bares the suffering of his mother's recent passing with the same determination and honesty as a final confession; the music becomes far from soothing and stripped of light, with piano and voice wringing the notes to convey a pernicious unease.

This is not an easy album — in fact it's at times disturbing, almost unlistenable as background music: Rufus demands attention for every note and word that animates his songs. Between Shakespeare's sonnets and quotations from Coleridge slip personal exhortations addressed to his late mother and his sister Martha, within a theatrical dimension that strips away any trace of the pop sound of his previous albums.

The neoclassical elegance of "Who Are You New York" flows smoothly, introducing the melancholic, nocturnal atmospheres of the album; only "Give Me What I Want And Give Me Now" briefly breaks the spell and the suspended mood, but the triptych of Shakespeare sonnets pours out a romanticism that's hard to absorb on first listen.

More direct and incisive is "The Dream", one of Rufus's finest ballads, with constant harmonic shifts and one of his best vocal performances; graceful and subtly cynical, "True Loves" plays with the musical-theatre temptations already exemplified by his tribute to Judy Garland, but it's "Sad With What I Have" that stands as the album's lyrical triumph, a poignant, elaborate ballad straddling blues and folk that any songwriter would long to have written.

"All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu" is an album bound to divide listeners; in truth, Rufus Wainwright's choice to forgo baroque arrangements lends the songs the breath of pure melodrama, releasing an intensity that needs to be absorbed slowly. The two closing tracks leave no doubt as to the album's quality: "Les Feux D'Artifice T'Appellent", taken from Rufus and Bernadette Colomine's stage work "Prima Donna", is a gem of modern operatics that forcefully ranks among the Canadian artist's finest compositions; the final track, "Zebulon", written while he was at his mother's deathbed, is a delicate succession of memories and emotions resting on a handful of notes rich in spirituality, rounding off one of the most spontaneous emotional journeys of his career.

Rufus Wainwright embraces a sound world free of glitter and modernist distractions, closer to the sonic solutions of his friend Antony and with clear nods to the Scott Walker of "3", which also inspired the album's cover. "All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu" opens new frontiers for the musician: its sense of the unfinished and of spiritual searching promises intriguing developments, and gives us a vital, uncompromising album — an excellent confirmation.

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17/04/2010