Charlotte Gainsbourg
IRM
Because Music
When pieces of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s IRM began to surface late last year, one of the internet favorites was a video for the single “Heaven Can Wait,” in which Gainsbourg, along with Beck—who produced the album and did a large bulk of its songwriting—were seen singing and playing amid a montage of images that made little sense when strung together. The video was by no means haphazard. Its unifying factor was simply hard to place.
The album as a whole follows suite. Stylistically, there is no one defining sound. Beck, after all, has been an avid genre-hopper and experimentalist from Mellow Gold right up to 2008’s Modern Guilt, and IRM winds up quite the mixed musical bag. Whispery ballads and grunge-era guitars go up against M.I.A.-esque raps and slouchy blues-rock in the course of 13 tracks, and would make for an arbitrary collection of sounds if not for the distinctly foreboding aura that hovers over the entire album.
The latter fact is hardly surprising; IRM was written in the wake of a water skiing accident that, in 2007, left Gainsbourg with a cerebral hemorrhage requiring emergency brain surgery. The letters I-R-M stand for imagerie par resonance magnétique—what the French call an MRI. The name is a not-so-subtle reminder of Gainsbourg’s near-death experience, which—along with her role in Lars Von Trier’s gratuitously graphic Antichrist—informs much of the album thematically.
In the title track, this is illustrated simply (and successfully) via the synthetic background noise that hypnotically mimics the clicking sounds made by machinery during an MRI examination. Similarly, the aforementioned “Heaven Can Wait,” a standout track, features handclaps and kickdrums that call to mind a somber funeral procession. “Heaven can wait, and hell’s too far to go,” sings Gainsbourg, suggesting a state of purgatory that crops up again and again. We’re not sure whether to grieve or rejoice, and Gainsbourg and Beck do everything they can to perpetuate that conundrum. “Time of the Assassins” features a melancholy string section over which Gainsbourg sings, “It doesn’t take a miracle to raise a heart from the dead” in a voice that’s angelic and, at times, even playful. In “Dandelion,” she tells us, “I’ll take my time before I go under ground” while a decidedly country bassline shuffles merrily along in the background.
Elsewhere, “Greenwich Mean Time” finds Gainsbourg doing a version of rap over a combination of analog and synthetic beats. “Me and Jane Doe” is the most upbeat track on the album, with its laidback acoustic picking and breezy choruses. “La Collectionneuse” is comprised of a simple melody laid over a haunting bassline and Gainsbourg singing, “The sum of all these parts/ I don’t know how to measure /They keep on adding up /They just keep on adding up,” thus closing the album appropriately.
Beck’s production and songwriting contributions are inarguably vital to the album’s success, as well as highly recognizable fare (shades of Modern Guilt and The Information are everywhere), but they play second fiddle here. Gainsbourg’s voice may be limited in its range, but she never wavers, and has, it seems, finally ceased to labor under the shadow of her famed father (pop provocateur Serge Gainsbourg) and his god-like legacy. The moment unarguably—and deservedly—belongs to her.
