RFI Musique - - French pop - Charlotte Gainsbourg: Back with Beck

Charlotte Gainsbourg: Back with Beck

New album: IRM

Paris

18/12/2009 -

Two years after her last album 5:55 (produced by French electro-pop hipsters Air), Charlotte Gainsbourg is back in the news with an album produced by American indie rock icon Beck. IRM is a more personal work than Charlotte's musical output to date and Beck's sonic experimentation in the studio guarantees that the French 'chanteuse' will get plenty of attention at home and abroad.

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Being the daughter of French music royalty (Charlotte's parents are none other than the late Serge Gainsbourg and British singer and actress Jane Birkin) is both a highly enviable and highly uncomfortable position. And Charlotte is the first to admit that whenever the subject of music comes up she automatically compares herself to her father. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that after recording her debut album at the age of fifteen (Charlotte for ever released in 1986), Ms. Gainsbourg chose to drop music and pursue an acting career instead.

Charlotte, who made her screen debut in Claude Miller's coming-of-age classic L'Effrontée, triumphed at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year carrying off the Best Actress award for her performance in Lars von Trier's Antichrist. 2009 was also the year Charlotte returned to the recording studio and set to work on her third album, IRM. Interestingly enough, her last album 5:55 was produced by two committed Serge Gainsbourg fans: Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel (Air.) And it turns out that Californian music maverick Beck, who manned the studio controls on IRM, also cites Charlotte's father as a formative influence.

Beck, renowned for his whizzkid genius in the studio, started out with the rhythms on IRM and then grafted instruments, arrangements and Charlotte's whispery vocals on top. Charlotte herself participated in some of the sonic experimentation and the resulting album is an impressively protean work which meanders freely between folk, pop and electronica. Listeners are treated to everything from crazy percussion-playing (Master's Hands, Trick Pony) and a collage of Apollinaire poems (The Collector) to a Velvet Underground-influenced track entitled Me and Jane Doe (a reference to Vanessa Paradis' dog!)

The album's title track is a darker and more disturbing number featuring actual sounds from an IRM scan. (The track recalls Charlotte's personal hospital experience when she was operated on for a brain injury after a water ski accident in 2007.) Did the making of IRM have therapeutic benefits for the singer? Charlotte is not saying, simply stating that IRM is her "most personal" album to date.

In the past, Ms. Gainsbourg has made a point of working with British stars (such as Jarvis Cocker and Nigel Godrich on 5:55) and singing in English (another way of avoiding comparisons with her father?) But IRM finds her reverting to French at times (notably on a surprise reworking of the Quebec classic Le Chat du Café des Artistes originally recorded by Jean-Pierre Ferland.) Although Charlotte neither composes her own music nor writes her own lyrics she has inherited a fine musical ear and her musical tastes (in French) run from classic 'chanson' (Charles Aznavour) to contemporary 'chanteuses' (Camille.) As to her own contribution to French music, Charlotte can now pride herself on having liberated her voice working with Beck and gaining greater confidence in herself as a singer. And despite confessing that the idea scares her out of her wits, Ms. Gainsbourg is due to hit the road for a series of concerts in 2010.