With a set that focused almost exclusively on songs from his new CD Want One, witty, swoony singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright managed to rock out from behind a piano at Avalon on Sunday night. Backed by a band of seven, Wainwright, who recorded his latest after a stint in rehab, performed with smashing vigor and managed to re-create the lush romantic soundscapes heard on his three CDs.
Clad in a tight leather Dior suit, the Canadian singer, who uses his high, flinty speaking voice in comical contrast to his huge, honey-coated-gravel croon, flirted and joked with the audience mostly young gay men and the women who share a taste in music.
He paused to tell a bit of backstory on many songs, such as ‘The Harvester of Hearts:’ ‘I wrote this about a straight guy, who’s now gay,’ he admitted with a coy look of guilt. ‘So look out.’
‘Vibrate,’ he offered, sprung from a romance with a go-go dancer (‘I was always waiting for him at bars with my cell phone on vibrate’).
Wainwright’s astonishing voice holds up beautifully live, so that the occasional flubbed lyric comes as a shocking flaw in the pristine presentation.
Often hailed for his piano ballads (many critics have dubbed him modern pop’s answer to Cole Porter), Wainwright managed to look like a genuine rock star when he was playing the guitar, as in the infectious ‘Movies of Myself.’ He effectively incorporated and highlighted the skills of his band, which included sis Martha Wainwright on backup vocals and excellent opening act Teddy Thompson (a sensitive English blues singer who writes razor-sharp lyrics) on acoustic guitar and backup vocals.
Some show highlights: a soaring ‘April Fools,’ one of two songs Wainwright played from his eponymous 1998 debut (the other was ‘Beauty Mark,’ a deliciously unsentimental ode to his mother, folksinger Kate McGarrigle); the expansive, ingratiating ‘I Don’t Know What It Is,’ from Want One; and the scabrously funny ‘California’ (‘It’s such a wonder / That I think I’ll stay in bed’) from 2002’s Poses.
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