This was true of his first album, too, and a distinctive sloppiness, or apparent randomness, is built in to Wainwright's performance style. He loves sudden lilts and lithe dips and lissome leaps of the voice, and he pulls them off for their own sake, with a quality of nonchalant bravado. Nobody would ever doubt that he can sing, but he tries unexpected shifts of register few trained singers would attempt. When they come off they're sublime, and when they don't they're even better--testament to a lazy virtuosity, with a passive-aggressive sexiness that's both boyish and sweetly androgynous. You can tell he's a great piano player, too, but he couldn't care less. He could be Gershwin with a voice, and an attitude; like Gershwin, he loves enjambments--loose, edgy lines that seem about to close just before they spill over into the next line, with a kind of willowy, melancholy exuberance.
The songs are about fairly standard song stuff: loving without being loved back, wanting to be alone without being lonely. Their tone is buoyant sadness or sad buoyancy. In the song that opens and closes the record he sings of his cravings (pronounced "cruh-viiiings") in a brash, dum-de-dum swing: "Cig-a-rettes and choc-o-late miiillllk..." The way he plays with the words speaks both his solitude--for he only has words to play with--and his wish to communicate in some new way; part nonsense, part rhyme. All these songs have a frowsy elegance; Rufus is never going to sing about dead skunks in the middle of roads, like his folk-hipster dad, Loudon Wainwright III. But he performs a cover of his father's great song "One Man Guy," and with his lazily exacting cadences, he gives it a new meaning. Magically, but casually, it turns into a song about fathers, and about being gay. Wainwright's still one of the few really gay singers with semi-mainstream aspirations. Naturally, therefore, the rap is that he's slight. But what his music's really about is the unbearable lightness of singing.
- To create paragraphs in your comment, type <p> at the start of a paragraph and </p> at the end of each paragraph.
- To create bold text, type <b>bolded text</b> (please note the closing tag, </b>).
- To create italicized text, type <i>italicized text</i> (please note the closing tag, </i>).
- Proper web addresses will automatically become links.
