Rufus Wainwright: Want One : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

This is a record of breathtaking, eccentric opulence: champagne violins and gothic-drama electronics; cream-cake choirs, Fourth of July brass and Rufus Wainwright's rough-silk voice, which sounds like a worn, inebriated diva gingerly sweeping down a staircase. It all could have been twice as fabulous. Wainwright's third album was to be a two-CD set simply called Want. Thanks to the miserable state of record-selling, it was cut in half; Want Two is due in the spring. But the awkward title of this installment makes perfect sense. Want One is a valentine to monogamy -- craving it, not getting it, not quite giving up. Wainwright, who is openly gay, wrote these songs after a season of chemical misadventure and sexual roulette, and his opening lines in "Pretty Things" and "Vibrate" are models of punchy, charming candor: "Pretty things/So what if I like pretty things?"; "My phone is on vibrate for you." That plain need is the real theater here. "I really don't want/To be John Lennon or Leonard Cohen," Wainwright sings in the title song. "I just want to be my dad/With a slight sprinkling of my mother," a witty, loving nod to the vocal and poetic gifts he inherited from his parents, Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle. With the sumptuous honesty of Want One, their son is now his own man.

DAVID FRICKE
(RS 933, October 16, 2003)