Pitchfork

Of the four albums Rufus Wainwright has released over the past six years, two of them have been part of the Want series, which pairs his dreamy voice and droll lyrics to audaciously over-the-top orchestration. But Wainwright's inspiration has never quite matched his devotion to the project, and this baroque setting is not entirely suitable for his considerable talents. He has a distinctive voice that imbued his first two albums with an instantly recognizable personality; yet, although he seems suited to show tunes and post-SoCal pop, his voice is lost among the flourishes of harp and harpsichord in the Want series. Even Wainwright's songwriting seems to suffer: his usually sparkling wit seems deadened by the weight of the music; his melodies lag, burdened by the profundity of their mission.

The songs on last year's Want One sounded leaden under their overlush arrangements, and Want Two doesn't improve on that formula. If anything, it is a darker, more meditative sequel, less lively but more fragile and sensitive to the cruelties of a vicious world-- tragedy to its precursor's comedy. The album opens unpromisingly-- almost hostilely-- with the nearly six-minute "Agnus Dei", an overture full of gently pulsating strings and Latin lyrics. The song isn't just singularly dull, but it reveals the weaknesses of these sessions. Wainwright's gauzy vocals aren't particularly suited for this style of melodramatic music and often come across as disaffected or, worse, disengaged. Furthermore, the obsessiveness of his artistic vision often threatens to alienate his listeners through overlong songs and esoteric production.

Fortunately, "The One You Love" quickly corrects the album's course, harking back to Wainwright's first two albums. It blends gently swaying pop with an angelic choir and the dulcimer-like guitar on the chorus, and shows off his gifts for introspective lyrics full of biting wit and for arrangements that are all the more dramatic for being understated. Songs like "This Love Affair", "Gay Messiah", and "Crumb by Crumb"-- which could have come from either of his previous albums-- only reinforce this impression.

However, the Want sensibility-- music as theatrical stage setting-- resurfaces throughout the album: in the recorder melody on "Hometown Waltz", in the chamber strings on "Little Sister", in the eddying instrumentation of the Jeff Buckley eulogy "Memphis Skyline". These songs seem uniformly static. Only the live recording of "The Art Teacher" manages to break form: Over a Philip Glass prism of piano chords, a plaintive horn, and a slightly sped-up tempo, Wainwright tells of a woman remembering her first love, the instructor of the title who turned her on to Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner.

In a sense, the Want project sounds perfectly suited to Wainwright's ability to confront his problems through lyrical witticisms and to intensify all emotions-- especially romantic longings-- to an operatic level. But His tragedies remain exclusively personal; they rarely, if ever, extend to any community, gay or otherwise, and the songs derive some power from their insistently individual scope. On "Waiting for a Dream", Wainwright sings in the first verse: "You are not my lover, and you never will be/ Cause you've never done anything to hurt me." The "Gay Messiah" mixes gay and Christian iconography, but the Savior-- who is "reborn from 1970s porn"-- is Wainwright's own personal Jesus; he even proclaims himself "Rufus the Baptist" and turns the refrain "The gay messiah is coming" into frank wordplay.

Wainwright's obsession and self-destructive tendencies extend to his music as well, sabotaging the Want project but making both albums fascinating, even moving, in a peculiar way. Watching such an undeniably talented artist blindly follow such an errant muse can be endlessly compelling, and the failure of these two albums to capture his visions and ambitions with any adequacy possesses the pull of true tragedy. This doesn't necessarily elevate the music, but it does present Wainwright as both the fated tragic hero and the sexually ambiguous victim of the two album covers and it does recast the project as a small triumph within an extended train wreck.