Yahoo! Music Review

Released on 14/05/07
Label: Geffen

When most musicians take themselves off to Berlin, it's to discover their latent industrial techno side - when Rufus Wainwright went their to record his fifth album last summer, he discovered his inner King Ludwig instead, dressing in lederhosen (see booklet), visiting rococo castles and ambling foppishly through the Tiergarten to the sound of a harp. If he was out-of-time in contemporary America, marinating an album in one of the world's other most hated countries sets him even further apart from the norm. Jawohl!

This Old Germanic opulence leaves its mark on the lyrics and music in various ways. He's always been operatic but at times here, with arrangements involving massed orchestras, choirs and sundry backing singers (including producer Neil Tennant and Joan Wasser (aka Joan As Policewoman) and no chance to squeeze in a woodwind flourish squandered, he's positively Wagneresque. Feel the Sturm Und Drang in the abundance of thunderstormy, highly emotional minor-key symphonising. There are the ghosts of Christopher Isherwood and Kurt Weill. He talks of the Iron Curtain. And there's a song about ambling foppishly through the Tiergarten to the sound of a harp.

The album's Randy Newman-esque key track, "Going To A Town", has been held up as an erudite protest song against the US ("I'm so tired of you America / You took advantage of a world that loved you well") - but is equally a tender ode to the history-drenched German capital - "A town that has already been burnt down / A place that has already been disgraced" (and what an elegant bit of internal rhyming that is, moreover). The edgy, relatively pared-down "Tulsa", dedicated to The Killers' Brandon Flowers - who Wainwright says "mesmerises" him - its pure American musical theatre. He has honed his tremendous gift for bathos (an admittedly Marmite-like quality - you either love epic string-laden grandiosity teamed with campy lines like "If I am not prominently featured in your next slideshow / I don't know what I'm gonna do" or you don't).

Occasionally the relentless theatrics get too much: "Between My Legs" boasts not only an OTT spoken word excerpt by legendary Brit luvvie Sian Philips but also an interpolation of "Phantom Of The Opera". "Slideshow"'s slow-starting rumination on paranoid frustration ("I paid a lot of money to get you over here, you know") regrettably turns into a dreadful Fairport Convention style folk rock guitar solo noodle which may well simply be there so that in live renditions Rufus can go off and wolf down a quick bockwurst. And diction-wise there are still too many lines that sound like: "yeerrhhhverhbuurhhvurghh."

As if it matters. This is so rich, so intelligent, so feeling, that most of us will throw our hands limply in the air and join voices with mum Kate McGarrigle who, according to the dedication on the back, "still whispers in my ear that I'm great".

    by Anna Britten