Audio CD review:
Rufus Wainwright - Want Two (CD/DVD combo)

Rufus Wainwright - Want Two (CD/DVD combo)

Band: Rufus Wainwright Title: Want Two (CD/DVD combo) Rating: Release Date: 16 November, 2004 Media: Audio CD Tracks: 1: Agnus Dei 2: The One You Love 3: Peach Trees 4: Little Sister 5: The Art Teacher 6: Hometown Waltz 7: This Love AFfair 8: Gay Messiah 9: Memphis Skyline 10: Waiting For A Dream 11: Crumb By Crumb 12: Old Whore's Diet

Editoral Review Want Two perhaps reflects Wainwright's revised priorities since stepping back from the recreational medication precipice. 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. 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 .. You can see a complete list of all Rufus Wainwright discography, or go back to the Rufus Wainwright tabs