As was the case with his previous album, All Days Are Night, Wainwright’s seventh studio LP was recorded in the shadow of an unexpected death. Last time, it was the singer’s mother, folk chanteuse Kate McGarrigle, who lost her battle with cancer aged 63. On this occasion, Rufus and his producer Mark Ronson got together in London a week after Amy Winehouse’s tragic demise. She and Wainwright knew each other vaguely but Ronson, who part master-minded Back To Black, was a brother to her and was in the full flow of grief while working on Out Of The Game. Strangely, though, it’s a record full of hope.
Having tried, with increasingly unconvincing results, to follow-up the grandiosity of his two-disc Want project from 2004, here Wainwright kicks back and delivers a relatively straight-up pop LP, albeit one burnished with the melancholic acceptance that, at 38, his youth is over, the long march towards midlife (and beyond) just begun. On the title-track, Wainwright does a good impression of sounding as if he’s just beamed in from 1978 – it’s languid and singer-songwriterly, and has the super-saturated quality of a polaroid snap. Meanwhile, ‘Jericho’ is the sort of lilting, torch-song he’d seemingly given up on, circa ‘The One You Love’; ‘Candles’ is a moving paean to his late mother, wherein he recalls lighting a flame to her memory in Notre Dame (Rufus, being Rufus, would have to pick the world’s most OTT house of worship as a cradle for his grief). The recent birth of his daughter Viva – to Leonard Cohen’s eldest child Lorca – was the inspiration for ‘Montauk’, the album’s best song, and perhaps his finest stripped-down ballad since ‘The Art Teacher.’ “One day you will come to Montauk,” he croons, “and see your dad trying to be funny…” Capturing what is truly great about Rufus, it is sweet, simple and heart-stoppingly gorgeous.