Want Two (CD/DVD combo)

Rufus Wainwright

A wild-card songwriter with a familial pedigree and an ever-expanding cult retinue, the raffish but assiduous Rufus Wainwright--outré, gay, and sage--is not one to shy away from invigorating his songs with a lurid theatrical honesty. Want Two perhaps reflects Wainwright's revised priorities since stepping back from the recreational medication precipice. Opening number "Agnus Die"--a medieval Catholic liturgy given an eastern flavor and performed with Hungarian instruments--seeks spiritual laundering and clemency, but this virtue is offset by the implied vice and self-loathing of grand finale "Old Whore's Diet," a brilliantly irrational sprawl of skewed genius taking in Latin-American grooves and a doomy operatic Radiohead-esque requiem. Between these polar extremes lies Wainwright's eye for improbable observational finesse. Few others could express the first lovestruck flush of teenage infatuation with such deliberate inarticulacy ("Art Teacher") or envisage the coming of a "Gay Messiah" dripping in testicular fluid. He's evidently an attention-craving naughty boy with a love of Serge Gainsbourg, Elvis Costello and harpsichords, but on Want Two Rufus Wainwright makes sex, drugs, politics--and yes, belated redemption--sound positively velvety. --Kevin Maidment

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