Rufus Wainwright
Poses

THE REVIEW

Rufus Wainwright is a thirty-year-old Canadian who did not take long to enter the world of music; in fact, having grown up in a family of musicians (his father is Loudon Wainwright III and I can see you all wondering, who might that be?), he was enlightened by pop after spending his entire adolescence bent over the piano studying opera arias and the great composers of the past.

Seated at the piano and accompanied by a band that is tasked with matching his moods, Rufus recounts with a good voice twelve stories of love and carelessness, thus giving the idea of heading towards a pleasant mix between the pop of the Beatles and a classical taste for composition.
The beauty of his compositions, they couldn't be called anything else, is that every Rufus song contains many more: his songwriting follows bizarre and at the same time enchanting paths. Thus already Greek Song, the second track of this Poses, voluptuously combines the rhythms of a military march, the exoticism of an Indian violin, and the decadent melody of a grand piano, solemn as in a requiem.
Poses is his second album and dates back to 2001, followed by Want One and the newly released Want Two, but in my opinion, this is his best work, the most beautiful and accessible.

His music is like this: it seduces and at the same time stuns, with songs that are complicated in their arrangements, yet able to reach our most intimate zones. His voice is unmistakable, it is a particular timbre, sweet, powerful, often almost a lament; after the first listen, it is impossible to forget it.
There are artists like this, capable with their voice or songs to reach deeply inside us leaving us with an almost annoying feeling of having violated our intimacy. His beauty lies in this, when you listen to him, you feel stripped of every external mask and at the same time lulled in a baroque and distant world.

I recommend, to get an idea, listening to his cover of Across the Universe by the Beatles, also featured on the I Am Sam soundtrack.
For those who have seen The Aviator, you should know that the young pianist in the film is him. Welcome to the court...