Rufus Wainwright - Release The Stars (2007)

A Juno-winning, Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter whose lush, theatrical
pop harks back to the traditions of Tin Pan Alley, cabaret, and even opera,
Rufus Wainwright emerged with his self-titled debut in 1998. Quickly rising
from club residencies to international headliner status, his fifth studio
album, 2007's Release the Stars, became his most commercially successful to
date, with a reach that included the Top 30 of the Billboard 200 and as
high as the Top Five in the UK and Norway.

Demonstrating his appreciation for the vocal era as well as for her
standing as a gay icon, he delivered the Judy Garland tribute Rufus Does
Judy at Carnegie Hall - his first live album - that same year. Challenging
his composing and arranging skills, he premiered his first opera, Prima
Donna, in 2009 (a recording followed in 2015), and 2016's Take All My
Loves: 9 Shakespeare Sonnets set select poems to Wainwright's music. It
included such esteemed guests as Helena Bonham Carter, Carrie Fisher, and
Florence + the Machine's Florence Welch. Wainwright returned with his first
pop album in eight years, Unfollow the Rules, in 2020.

If ever there was an artist that embodied both the urbane popular
songsmithing of Cole Porter and the epic winged grandeur of Richard Wagner
it is Rufus Wainwright. Having not so much perfected as succumbed to this
yin-yang pull on his laboriously ambitious and intermittently inspired 2003
and 2004 albums Want One and Want Two, Wainwright once again delivers a
baroque collection of songs on 2007's Release the Stars.

Recorded at least partially in Berlin and London with Pet Shop Boys lead
Neil Tennant, the album finds Wainwright casting himself as a kind of
expatriate torch singer, a veritable Marlene Dietrich of emotion who, as he
laments on "Going to a Town," is "so tired of America." In that sense,
Release the Stars is at once intensely personal and utterly theatrical with
Wainwright playing both ing駭ue and femme fatale in a series of
increasingly cinematic pop-operas about true love gone not so much bad, but
sad.

He pleads to make it to the other side of town, and possibly the other side
of monogamy, with his brown-eyed lover in "Tiergarten" and dreams lazily
about, "the boys that made me lose the blues and then my eyesight" on
"Sanssouci." While these songs are lushly produced, often with full
orchestration, and while Wainwright has a knack for pretty, lilting
melodies and concrete imagery there is nonetheless a distinct lack of pop
hooks here. In fact, only the chugging T. Rex inspired glam rock of
"Between My Legs" gets at any real pop meat.

The main problem is that it's never quite clear if Wainwright, who has
always been to pop music as cabaret is to Broadway, is dressing opera up as
pop or vice versa. But when you wear custom Lederhosen as well as
Wainwright does throughout the album liner notes, does it really matter?