Album Review: Take All My Loves: 9 Shakespeare Sonnets

The future hasn’t quite arrived for Rufus Wainwright, who, the bones of 20 years into his career, remains a cult artist rather than a megastar. He is said to have been especially devastated by the under-performance of 2012’s Out Of The Game, a zingy, Mark Ronson-produced pop bacchanal that argued forcefully that Wainwright was – or is the outstanding songsmith of his generation.
Hurtling towards his mid 40s, with a husband and a daughter, Wainwright would seem to have spent the intervening four years working through a kind of mid-life musical crisis. He has composed operas, dueted with Robbie Williams and performed stripped down tours, accompanied by half-sister Lucy Wainwright Roche dressed as Liza Minnelli. Nobody could fault him for not thinking outside the box.
But his wanderlust has led him down a potentially hazardous route with his eighth studio album. A musical transposition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Take All My Loves is partly bonkers and, in places, borders on being unlistenable. William Shatner and Carrie Fisher chew the walls with their spoken word pieces; meanwhile, an interchangeable cast of sopranos (Florence Welch among them) sheath the Bard’s verses in opera-esque frills as strings burble and shriek in the background. There are frustrating glimpses of what might have been. The biggest problem here is that there isn’t much Rufus on it (well that and the cover illustration of the artist as an Elizabethan noblewoman). When he does show up the results are sparkling, as on the synth-tinged ‘Take All My Loves (Sonnet 40)’ and the gloriously out there ‘Unperfect Actor (Sonnet 23)’, which pairs Wainwright’s questing croon with a Helena Bonham Carter introduction and a Sisters Of Mercy-esque riff. More of that and this could have been a fine addition to a glittering catalogue. As it is, Take All My Loves rates as a very odd curio.
_Out Now // Ed Power