Rufus Wainwright
Want One

THE REVIEW

Rufus Wainwright, an artist I discovered by sheer chance who managed to captivate me, truly opening the doors to a new musical world yet to be explored. It was enough to listen to a few random MP3s ("One Man Guy", "Hallelujah", "Little Sister", "April Fools", "Across The Universe") to definitively convince me to invest my money in this artist, and my first, ecstatic encounter was indeed "Want One", dated 2003. It's an album that very well represents the personality of its creator: contemplative yet at the same time radiant, deep but clear and crystalline, a bit folk, a bit country, classical and baroque, with simple, pleasant, catchy, and never redundant melodies, lyrics somewhere between intimate and visionary, and a voice of disarming beauty, sweet but not saccharine, capable of captivating and moving like very few others.

In the tracklist of "Want One", the ballads take the leading role, brief and ecstatic musical fragments like the very sweet and hypnotic "Vicious World", one of the album's highest peaks, the ethereal and vaguely ironic "Vibrate", and the more minimal and tormented "Pretty Things", where the Canadian singer-songwriter's voice is accompanied only by the notes of a piano, or more languid and extended episodes like the sextet that starts with the soft and almost fairytale atmosphere of "Natasha" and ends with the magical notes of the piano ballad "Dinner At Eight", reaching peaks of absolute beauty like the almost title track "Want", an intimate and introspective song dominated by the acoustic guitar, or the dreamy lullaby "Harvester Of Hearts". To make it all even more beautiful and special, there's a trio of more lively and catchy episodes, potentially three great singles: "I Don't Know What It Is", "Movies Of Myself", and especially the wonderful "14th Street", songs that immediately lodge in your head and captivate with the freshness and spontaneity of the melodies, while the more original and out-of-the-ordinary episodes are "Go Or Go Ahead", a soft and bucolic country ballad that comes to life in the chorus where electric guitars decisively emerge, and the opener "Oh What A World", where ethereal and rarefied atmospheres coexist, the lazy sound of a tuba and almost cinematic orchestrations, all surrounding lyrics interpreted as if they were a kind of mantra.

"Want One" is a beautiful and moving album from the first to the last note, where the 14 songs that compose it flow in a fluid and harmonious manner. There are no superfluous episodes or stylistic falls, and each composition is perfectly curated instrumentally where to the piano, an instrument of which Ours is a true virtuoso, are added acoustic guitars, choruses, wind instruments of all kinds, keyboards, and orchestrations, thus creating a very refined sound base on which the wonderful voice of Rufus Wainwright can make the difference and leave an unmistakable mark that makes "Want One" a true masterpiece, fully deserving all my 5 stars and perhaps even something more.