Poses : Rufus Wainwright : Review : Rolling Stone

Rufus Wainwright's first album was really good, but it was also really hard to take. There was something so strident in the display of his talent: navel-gazing poetry, high-drama wit, harmony from nineteenth-century classical music and melodies influenced by musical theater, plenty of key changes. But it also felt precious beyond belief, and a good part of that had to do with Wainwright's narrowly pitched, nasal boulevardier's whine.

With Poses, three years later, most of his excesses have vanished, or been put to better use. Great pop albums are successful evocations of a type of life; it must be a life lived by more than one person, but it doesn't matter if it's a small handful (the circle of trannies and drug connections described by Lou Reed's Transformer) or thousands (the post-hippie women who understood Joni Mitchell's Blue on the deepest frequencies). Poses achieves this for the life of the Chelsea Boy: the young, gay, narcissistic achiever in New York. But the Chelsea Boy is only a magnified version of practically every kid new to a big city who's got a job and an apartment and worries about weekend plans: The Chelsea Boy just has sharper clothes, higher standards of beauty and a better tradition of mordant humor to console himself with.

Let's not overstate: Wainwright is not the second coming of Cole Porter. The consistency isn't there, and he's good enough to make you wish he wouldn't mangle grammar. ("There's never been such grave a matter/As comparing our new brand-name black sunglasses" is a great couplet, except that such is crying out to be so.) But the best of Poses transmits the impatient, careening, manic life of a pleasure-seeking New Yorker and still keeps a carefully calibrated lightweight focus, the way those old, literate pop songs did.

With its Broadway-ready melody, "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" enlarges little problems of indulgence, stanza by stanza, into a much sadder picture of a young striver whose unanswerable needs become the focus of the whole work. As this figure goes to California and to Europe (Wainwright is the kind of guy who'll sing snatches of French and reference Thomas Mann's Death in Venice), he confronts his own loneliness in all his lovers' faces and throws off some memorable lines: "I'm drunk and wearing flip-flops on Fifth Avenue"; "Ain't it a shame that at the top/Still those soft-skin boys can bruise you/Yes, I fell for a streaker"; "Life is the longest death in California." As well a lot of lines that aren't really meant to be understood, like "All the pearls in China/Fade astride a Volta."

Wainwright uses a greater singing range now; his maundering voice has become infinitely easier to listen to. Despite Poses' multiple producers, there are more clean, clever ideas of arrangement here than on Wainwright's cluttered debut. "Shadows," co-written with Alex Gifford of Propellerheads, keeps a dry funk drumbeat, a dab of piano chords, some low clarinet lines and, finally, a swarm of seraphic multitracked voices; it's one of the many songs on the album that build up to moments of cinematic perfection, in which your goose bumps are exactly the ones Wainwright intended.

BEN RATLIFF
(RS 871 - June 21, 2001)