As an inverse to Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire having Renée Zellweger at “Hello”, Rufus Wainwright might well lose the more nervous listener at the 87th second of Release the Stars.This is where he introduces – to stormy seas of orchestral unrest and surges of impending doom – what sounds like a children’s choir singing the refrain “Brimstone! Destruction! Of All! Mankind!” It sounds like an outtake from the soundtrack to The Lion King – as scored by Wagner, instead of Elton.

The skittish listener, however, would be misguided to abandon Release the Stars at such an early juncture. For while, Do I Disappoint You, an opening track of semi-hysterical Broadway-meets-Verdi would suggest that things are very much business as usual for the man who, on his 1998 debut album, claimed that “Schubert bust my brain”, it actually marks the beginning of what will almost certainly be considered one of the most rewarding – and most unexpected – albums of 2007. For almost the entire hour of its duration, Wainwright’s fifth album brings to mind the great lodestone records of the late 1960s – Pet Sounds, The White Album – albums on which the artists, having fully mastered and defined the genres that they worked in, suddenly seemed to cast their eye across the entire musical landscape and said, with a drag on their cigarette: “I’m having that. All of it.”

Until this point Wainwright’s career has long felt like an unlikely, fabulous, but ultimately imperilled indulgence. As the flamboyant princeling prodigy of folk royalty (Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, of the McGarrigle sisters), Wainwright is the composer of four albums of gorgeous, indulgent, orchestral excess. A crystal meth habit so whole-hearted that in 2002 it left Wainwright temporarily blind merely seemed to illustrate his capacity for wanton extremity and general torch-song ghettoisation.

However, Release the Stars marks a ravishing left turn into sunny, electrified, West Coast charm, unfeasibly but thrillingly hitched to Wainwright’s Rococo operettas and Randy Newmanesque proclivities. In a serotonin-triggering swirl of harps, zithers, horns, electric piano, rolling bass and, of course, strings, Wainwright, more often than not, reins in his racehorse voice until the finishing line is in sight. On the warm-sea heartbreak of Ready to Love – which, with its plashy, brushed snares, oceanic strings and opiated pace, recalls the Beach Boys’ ’Til I Die – Wainwright sings: “I’m not ready to love you/ Until I’m ready to love you the way you should be loved,” as gently as a mother.

You can imagine the Tapestry-era Carole King walking on stage to join Wainwright halfway through the Bush-bashing Going to a Town,with its refrain of “I’m so tired of America”. The Fairport Convention legend Richard Thompson, meanwhile, actually does join him halfway through Slideshow with a country-rock guitar exposition.

And the album’s title track has a sauntering, Bacharach & David feel, augmented by hot pavement horns, before letting rip with the kind of feel-good, closing-credits crescendo that ensures that, for at least an hour subsequently, even making a cup of tea will be accompanied by an inescapable sense of drama. This has always been the way of Rufus Wainwright – skyscraping ambition executed with the languorous ease of a lion yawning. The stars will be released, in batches of fours and fives, in every review.

(Geffen)

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