Charlotte Gainsbourg - IRM

La fille avec les trous dans sa tête

Ever since the release of 1984’s father-and-daughter duet, Lemon Incest, Charlotte’s musical career – and, indeed, her parallel path as an indie actress du jour – has attracted more serious column inches than might have been expected. For her part, however, Charlotte long ago proved she wasn’t just the daughter of a legend; and, while 2006’s 5:55 saw Serge-worshippers queue up to write and produce Charlotte’s second album in her father’s mould, with IRM and the co-writing/ production help of Beck, she finally emerges from Serge’s shadow.

What that does mean, however, is that IRM is almost as much Beck’s album as it is Charlotte’s, lines such as “She’s hiding on a battleship of baggage and bones” or “Learn to speak in tongues – something that makes sense to you and to me” saying as much about their author’s current worldview (see last year’s Modern Guilt album) as they do his charge’s. That said, continually working close together into the studio sparked some eerie chemistry, not least when Beck penned the lyric, “Drill my head full of holes to let the memories fall out.”

Without knowing Gainsbourg’s recent history, he’d unwittingly referenced her string of MRI scans, conducted in the wake of a cerebral haemorrhage in 2007, and birthed the album’s title track (IRM being the French MRI). Using the scanner’s mechanical whirr as a motif, the song builds itself around Beck’s Information-era ethereal clang, while Charlotte recounts the scanning process in a mechanical drawl and Beck layers his own vocals to ghostly, enveloping effect.

Not strictly representative of the album as a whole, it allows IRM to open up to lullabies and scuzz-blues, crooked shanties (first single Heaven Can Wait) and a neat bag of tricks and atmospheric Beck backing vocals that permeate the whole with sometimes unnerving consequences. You can even play a neat game of guess-the-reference, as everything from CC Rider and Shake Sugaree, to The Beatles’ Glass Onion is invoked. Only on Voyage and a cover of Le Chat Du Café Des Artistes do the pair obviously channel Serge’s ghost; the former hitting upon Gainsbourg Percussions with Jean- Claude Vannier-like strings, the latter a cover of Jean-Pierre Ferland’s 60s track done à la Melody Nelson. Monsieur Gainsbourg’s questing spirit is, however, never far away and, while you get the feeling that Beck’s in a bit of a comfort zone, it’s definitely brought out the best in our chanteuse.

4 stars 4 stars 4 stars 4 stars

Because | BEC 5772602

Reviewed by Jason Draper
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