Anglo-French actress and singer-songwriter Charlotte Gainsbourg was born in London on 21 July, 1971 as Charlotte Lucy Gainsburg. She was raised in Paris by her mother British actress and singer Jane Birkin and her father French actor/singer Serge Gainsbourg. In 2006, Gainsbourg released her second album 5:55 to critical acclaim and commercial success, reaching the top spot on the French charts and achieving platinum status in the country. Charlotte Gainsbourg seems to have truly found her individual style in her recently released third studio album IRM.
Gainsbourg claims she handed Beck some sounds of whirring MRIs (the album title is the French term for the machines), and the pop eccentric took care of things from there. Beck is a whiz kid on Production and performs vocals with Gainsbourg on “Heaven Can Wait”. The two of them singing together strikes a palatable dream for fans and followers of Beck, Charlotte, or both. Without much training, Charlotte possesses a whisper of a voice delivered with intent that bathes in the albums extraordinary production. A sonic wonderland created by Beck is the ideal chariot for Gainsbourg’s floating fluttery haunting vocals to resonate from your ears to your belly and right down to your toes.
IRM is largely influenced by her roll in the 2009 horror film “Antichrist” with Willem Dafoe as well as an experience in September 2007 when Gainsbourg was rushed to a Paris hospital where she underwent surgery for a cerebral hemorrhage. She had been experiencing headaches since a minor water skiing accident in the United States several weeks prior.
Big lo-fi booming and gritty distorted guitar are the undertow that sucks you in on the song “Trick Pony”. With a brilliant use of percussion ala stomp in the song “Greenwich Mean Time” enveloping Gainsbourg’s somewhat monotone vocals that sound as if they are being delivered over a loud speaker in your high school cafeteria. It feels as if they channeled Elliot Smith on the song “Heaven Can Wait”. While the song “Voyage” has an evocative tribal feeling with a sub-orchestral string arrangement that peeks in and out between sounds of birds cawing. And if you close your eyes, you can almost imagine yourself on safari.
IRM is a modern pop-folk dream with an alternative influence and sprinkled elements of shaved industrial lo-fi sound that are surely the influence of Beck himself. I tip my hat to Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck on a wonderfully composed album that seems to take folk in 2010 in high form. Well done!
