What do you get when you mix seamless production, surrealistic lyrics, an airy alto, and a dark, eclectic sensibility? Charlotte Gainsbourg’s IRM, a honed sophomore release made all the more dazzling by indie darling Beck Hansen’s masterful composition skills.
This is an album that benefitted from two years of intensive time in the studio. Hansen wrote the music, cowrote the lyrics, produced, and mixed IRM, and judging from the success of his 2008 collaboration with Danger Mouse, one wonders if the debut track, “Master’s Hands,” is not—at least in some sense—self-referential. Gainsbourg’s own contribution is fitting for a Gallic ingénue: the album’s lyrical content, stream-of-consciousness delivery, and conceptual vision betray the winsome precociousness she has projected since her musical debut at thirteen. Gainsbourg draws on influences synthetic and macabre—Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (in which she had a starring role), but mostly her own stint trapped under MRI scanners for a brain aneurysm in 2007. And indeed, IRM (French for “MRI”) is awash with all the clicks, taps, buzzes, echoes, rhythmic pulsations, and existential wonderings you’d expect to enter the mind after being passed over by a machine in a world cold, stark, and colorless. Nowhere is this more evident than in the title track, in which Gainsbourg prettily pleads, “Take a look, what’s inside / Ghost imaging my mind,” and “Register all my fear / on a flowchart disappear,” against a beating, humming backdrop. “IRM” is a track that is striking as much for its haunting lyrics as it is its mechanical elegance.
Entering on the tail end of “IRM” is “Le Chat du Café des Artistes,”a hypnotic composition perfectly suited to a journey into the recesses of unconsciousness. Gainsbourg trails on liltingly in her native tongue with strings, piano, guitar, and a steady drumbeat all providing unobtrusive cushioning and accompaniment. This dreamy aesthetic—arguably, the dominating one of the album—stretches elegantly across the progression of the album and culminates with “Voyage” and “La Collectionneuse.” “Voyage” starts with a minimal guitar-and-djembe sequence and stretches into sweeping string sequences punctuated by Gainsbourg’s sung non sequiturs. Her voyage seems to be the precarious journey of the space between the conscious and subconscious, sleep and waking, and nonsense and clarity. “La Collectionneuse,” a detached ode to a compulsive collector of “many things,” is the perfect conclusion to this heady undertaking.
In its thinnest moments, IRM is the auditory equivalent of an antique chest of broken toys. While the overall sound is fascinatingly varied, a few components are too disassociated to fit together. A case of this is “Crooked Man,” which is a track that seems like a Le Tigre B-side with Gainsbourg’s distorted, roughed-up vocals matched with a dance-punk backbeat. The same goes for “Dandelion,” a too-ambitious attempt to meld blues conventions, sweeping orchestral moments, and overly quaint country lyrics like, “I better get back home soon / I got one eye on the road and one eye on the big black moon.” Gainsbourg should leave the conquering of the Wild West to Belle Starr and “down home” analogies to those who live in the country, and make good on what she knows best: symphonic, wispy confections of delicate language and sound that only a French woman could truly perfect.
All in all, though—a sophisticated album full of all the pop listenability and nuance you’d imagine from a Beck/Gainsbourg collaboration. |