Rufus Wainwright - All Days Are Nights

Until the unlikely day that Sufjan Stevens completes his 50th album Odes to Delaware, the crown of America’s most ambitious musician must surely belong on the head of Rufus Wainwright. You’ll have to excuse the opulent imagery, as nothing else seems to suit an artist whose recent creative output has reached levels of extravagance that would make Louis XIV feel slightly inadequate. Recreating Judy Garland’s legendary 1961 show at Carnegie Hall is one thing, but penning your own French libretto and transforming it into a debut opera written for 70 musicians? It’s an impressive CV by anyone’s standards.

Given his comfort in grandiosity, Wainwright’s sixth album All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu perhaps represents his boldest move yet. Shunning orchestral augmentation and studio flourishes, the songs here are deeply personal paeans to loved ones and family, not least to his late mother Kate McGarrigle. Each is performed as they would be heard live, solely voice and piano.

It’s an aesthetic that will no doubt have Rufus fans salivating in anticipation. After all, from ‘Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk’ through to ‘Dinner At Eight’ and ‘The Art Teacher’, emotional resonance has always flowed through Rufus most powerfully when sat alone at the piano stool. Accordingly, songs like ‘So Sad With What I Have’ and ‘What Would I Ever Do With a Rose?’ ache with poised, poetic vulnerability. “Then I think of you, how could someone so bright love someone so blue?” - he plaintively asks on the former - “Guess the world needs the sun and the moon…”

There’s a very tangible emotional weight present in the recording of these songs. You can almost sense the perspiration on his brow as his hands reposition on the polished ivory, the shifting of bodyweight as his feet recoil from the pedals. It creates a brooding intimacy which simmers throughout the whole album, before peaking with mesmerising composure on final song ‘Zebulon’, one of his most profoundly affecting to date. Through hazily recollected flashbulb-memories Rufus pines for contact with his eponymous childhood sweetheart. “All I need is your eyes, your nose was always too big for your face, still it made you look kinda sexy, more like someone who belongs in the human race.”

It’s not all heavy-hearted balladeering though. ‘Give Me What I Want and Give It To Me Now’ is a romp in the most old-fashioned sense of the word, excitedly darting about like it’s soundtracking a prim heroine letting her hair down in some forthcoming Jane Austen adaptation. Elsewhere the oscillating phrasing of ‘Who Are You New York?’ twists and turns elegantly underneath an assured vocal delivery. The poignant delicacy of ‘Martha’ is a hopeful ode to his younger sister, clearly evoking the hurried necessity of togetherness in the fading hours of a loved one.

It’s no secret that Rufus yearned for mainstream adulation with last album Release The Stars. Perhaps its failure to set cash registers alight may have provoked him into including some particularly inaccessible songs here. Take the three consecutive Shakespearean sonnets set to music in the middle of the album. In a work with no choruses to speak of, these three songs are a particularly laboured indulgence. Likewise ‘The Dream’ evokes Liszt with its erratic descent of scales and thundering crescendos, but together with the disaffected lyrics it comes across as impetuous, even for Wainwright’s standards.

Ultimately, an album as deeply personal and emotive as All Days Are Nights might only appeal to those who have followed the soap opera of Rufus Wainwright’s life so far. Like a Shakespearean monologue you’re either going to be living every moment with the narrator or gazing on indifferently as your attention drifts away. For those in the former camp, this is a challenging listen where life mirrors art in a profoundly resonant way.

Owl City - Ocean Eyezzzz

No matter what your age you can always be sure that pop music will be sniffing around your heels like a stray dog, looking for an easy opportunity to worm its way into your affections. Easily-targeted demographics had better watch out. Whether it’s the granny-luring charm of Susan Boyle or the Top Gear soundtrack intended to get Dad winding down the soft-top once and for all, everyone’s money is equally green.

Of course, the most easily obliging group are those who haven’t quite weighed up what exactly it is they do like yet, so in these times of dwindling industry-profits, welcome the new musical elite, the pre-pubescent tweens. A cursory glance at the Billboard Chart shows the likes of Miley Cyrus, High School Musical and the Jonas Brothers riding high, whilst on our side of the Atlantic Adam Young - aka Owl City - reached number one with ‘Fireflies.’ So, pop singer at number one eh? Nothing new there. So why all the vitriol?

Perhaps it’s because Ocean Eyes is not the work of an America’s Got Talent winner, but of a shy musician who has spent years escaping insomnia by crafting intimate laptop-pop in his parent’s basement. It might seem like he’s sprung from nowhere, but this is in fact his third record, the first two being low-key self-released affairs. In interviews he speaks quietly from beneath a swept fringe about Boards of Canada and growing up as an introverted loner. It’s all very Conor Oberst, it’s all very… indie.

And there’s the crux of the matter. Owl City don’t sound like a mainstream pop band, they sound like a Fisher Price My First Postal Service, shorn of lyrical subtlety and left to soak overnight in tepid rosewater. There’s genuine emotion here, but with all bones carefully removed so you’re left with an album that’s twee-er than two ragdolls on a houseboat. I could take up the entire word-count of this review picking out childishly sentimental lyrics like “you’re the bird, I’m the worm, its plain to see we were meant to be” or “every mushroom cloud has a silver lining” but I’m sure you get the point.

It seems that for those with a well-honed sense of us vs them, Owl City have crossed an unspoken divide. As if by nudging in on the territory marked out by Ben Gibbard back in 2003, Young has somehow hitched a free-ride to the top of the charts and now occupies a prickly no-mans-land between indie and mainstream.

But such pessimism is not a label that fits Owl City well, and hiding beneath the syrupy vocals is a record filled with surprising musical innovation. There’s delicately uplifting strings on ‘On The Wing’ whilst ‘Umbrella Beach’ rachets through the gears from hushed verse to shimmering euro-disco chorus. Its relentlessly positive music that skips and bleeps its way along in a way that renders critical dissection slightly awkward, like being hostile to a Tickle-Me-Elmo. Naturally Ocean Eyes contains plenty of songs that are flimsier than a 99p windbreaker. ‘Dental Care’ for example is a ditty about, well, how much Young hates going to the dentist. ‘Vanilla Twilight’ invents a beta-version of twee-mo with the lines “The stars lean down and kiss you/ I lie awake and miss you/ pour me a heavy dose of atmosphere” and the way Young pronounces the word ‘fireflies’ pushes the rhoticity of the American accent into an entirely new spherical realm. However, this is music aimed squarely for the naïve-at-heart, and the industrial knife-sharpeners are best waved elsewhere than at the entirely likeable Young. If these genteel Casio-noodlings are what the kids are going to be listening to in 2010, I predict a peaceful year for the rest of us.