From embodying a sadistically crazed wife in the avant-garde horror film “Antichrist,” to playing a sharp-witted love interest in the French romantic comedy “Prête-moi ta main,” actress Charlotte Gainsbourg has proven her prowess as an actor.
With her latest album “IRM,” released Jan. 19 via Elektra Records, she seeks to do the same for her reputation as a musician.
So how does Gainsbourg, an aspiring musician with a reputation for musical monotony, go about establishing herself as a serious and critically-acclaimed music artist? Recruiting eclectic American music icon Beck to write, produce, and perform on “IRM” is a good start.
Similar to Beck’s somber 2002 masterpiece “Sea Change,” and more recent “Modern Guilt,” “IRM” overflows with eerie classical guitars, melancholy string arrangements and lyrics obsessed with the truly final frontier — death.
And why not? After a waterskiing accident in 2007, Gainsbourg had to undergo emergency surgery after an MRI — “IRM” backwards — revealed a life-threatening brain hemorrhage.
“Drill my brain / all full of holes / and patch it up before it leaks,” says Gainsbourg on the album’s first track, “Master’s Hands.” This theme of an obsession with the end weaves in and out through the duration of “IRM.”
Featuring wandering, gentle percussion with an occasional noisy bass drum blast, subdued, shivering acoustic guitar lines and orchestral violins, “Master’s Hands” transitions into a busy and helter-skelter track. “IRM” works with other songs on the album like “Trick Pony,” “Greenwich Mean Time” and “Looking Glass Blues,” to set up a cloudy juxtaposition between the two types of tracks on the album — those that sound like b-sides off “Sea Change,” and those that sound like “Modern Guilt.”
Beck’s involvement on “IRM” is truly its saving grace. That is not to say that Gainsbourg does not play an important role, bringing lyrics inspired by her near-death experience and her haunting voice to the table, but what sets “IRM” apart from her earlier forays into the music industry is Beck’s experience in recording and production.
If anything, the record plays more like a Beck album featuring the actress on vocals than it is a Gainsbourg album. Getting too caught up in looking for parallels between “IRM” and Beck’s back catalogue, however, keeps one from accepting the album for what it is — a respectable effort on behalf of Gainsbourg and Beck to convey their interest and insatiable curiosity in whatever it is that happens when one’s time runs out.
In the end, “IRM” plays very much like a modern day “The Velvet Underground and Nico,” (which Beck actually covered track to track in 2009) — pitting careful, lo-fi arrangements and experimentation against brooding female vocals.
Though the album is made possible by Beck’s mastery of the arts of songwriting and recording, what “IRM” ultimately accomplishes — awareness that death is both omnipresent and unavoidable — can be attributed to Gainsbourg’s real life experience and ghostly vocal performances.
Reach reviewer Paul Squyer at Paul.Squyer@usd.edu.
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