Rufus Wainwright and Neko Case at the VooDoo

Neko Case and Rufus Wainwright

Better Than: Dinner for two at Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar and Grill

Review by Scott Wilson. Photos by Michael Forester.

Anyone hoping to hear Rufus Wainwright’s best music — the bright, concise letters from a young genius that made up his first two albums and the leaner parts of the Want discs — got an earful of spam at the VooDoo Lounge last night. The songwriter and his seven-piece band, dressed as pieces of Fruit Stripe gum, emerged around 9:30 and committed themselves to a breathless recital of the Wainwright hymnal, a book of cloudy self-devotionals that sounded no more exciting onstage than on this year’s frustrating Release the Stars — though equally bombastic.

Early in his performance, Wainwright dedicated “Sans-Souci,” one of the cannier (and gayer) cuts on Stars, to Toby Keith, namesake and absentee proprietor of the steakhouse next door, and praised the Liberty Memorial as an impressive ode to the phallus. That was as witty as things got. Most of the show was devoted to the business of keeping the blood flowing to his priapic new songs, too many of them lurid boleros swollen with French horn parts and Ron Burgundy flute solos.