I found myself with one extra song that I didn’t want to scrap, so Rufus Wainwright Week has been extended by a day. Lucky you! 🙂
Wainwright contributed this somber ballad to the soundtrack of Ang Lee’s powerful Brokeback Mountain. It played over the end credits, after that haunting final scene in which Heath Ledger’s stoically passionate Ennis Del Mar strokes his dead lover’s shirt and murmurs “Jack, I swear.”
I can’t believe that movie lost Best Picture to Crash! Come on!
Wainwright’s 5th, and most recent, studio album was Release the Stars, probably his weakest effort to date but still one of the best albums I’ve heard in the past few years. Unfortunately it’s been almost impossible to find YouTube clips from this album. I’ve previously highlighted ‘Going to a Town,’ one of my favorite tracks on the album, and a live version of ‘Sanssouci‘ on this blog, so feel free to check those out.
Instead of a crappy live version of another Release the Stars track, I’m turning today to one of the many soundtrack contributions Wainwright has made over the years, this one for the animated film Meet the Robinsons.
It’s been five years since Eminem’s last album — the mediocre Encore — and I’m torn on whether his new one, Relapse, was worth the wait.
On the one hand, it is a return to form in many ways — the rhymes are fast and furious and Dr. Dre’s production particularly strong — but on the other hand, I wonder if Eminem in form is really enough of a draw anymore. The violent sexual fantasies that were so shocking and unsettling on his first two albums, especially when you found yourself guiltily chuckling through them, feel like retreads all these years later.
Want Two contains a lot of ambitious and emotional music: album opener ‘Agnus Dei’ is a string-drenched, hyper-passionate Catholic hymn performed in Latin; closer ‘Old Whore’s Diet’ is a 9-minute epic alternating between a capella crooning and Mediterranean dance beats; ‘Little Sister’ is a baroque treat that, stripped of its vocals, would sound like it was written in the early 18th century.
But the song I love the most of all is the simplest tune on the album — the acoustic stroll of ‘Gay Messiah.’
Want Two came out a year after Want One, and the main distinction I’d draw between the two albums is that this one takes a more feminine perspective while the first was more masculine.
That dichotomy is borne out in the cover art… Want One depicting Wainwright dressed as a knight in a suit of armor while Want Two depicts him as a lady in waiting. In an embarrassing show of homophobia, the record company released Want Two with a giant sticker of critics quotes placed directly over Wainwright in drag. As if anybody buying his album would be scared off by that image?
