“IRM”
from the album IRM
2010
iTunes
The daughter of French pop auteur Serge Gainsbourg and singer Jane Birkin, Charlotte Gainsbourg has been a top-notch actress the last two decades (most recently starring alongside Willem Dafoe in Antichrist). But her infrequent detours into music have an integrity all their own. After making a provocative debut album overseen by her father in the ’80s when she was just a teenager, Gainsbourg re-emerged in 2006 to record 5:55, produced by Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich (with songwriting contributions from Air and Jarvis Cocker). Her third release IRM finds her hooking up with yet another of her father’s acolytes, Beck, who produced, composed the music, and co-wrote the lyrics.
The singer’s plainspoken bi-lingual vocals have lost some of their wispiness, replaced by a firmer tone that matches the subject matter: an unflinching look at her near-death experience in a 2007 water-skiing accident. She underwent surgery for a cerebral hemorrhage and her frequent MRI brain scans are acknowledged in the album title (IRM is the French acronym for magnetic resonance imaging). Gainsbourg does not invite pity, however, nor does she indulge in survivor’s bromides. Instead she and Beck turn her trauma and treatment into a psychedelic experience, right down to reproducing the sounds of the womb-like scanner in the title song.
Ramshackle percussion and queasy string arrangements push Gainsbourg out of comfortable French-ballad mode into heavier and spookier terrain. Though the album hits a few sleepy troughs along the way, it gets progressively stranger and more aggressive, with distorted bass (“Trick Pony”), tribal drumming (“Voyage”) and T-Rex-style boogie (“Dandelion”) giving Gainsbourg room to stretch. She does so with sensual ease, as if to suggest that after all she’s been through, nothing could make her lose her cool.