O Death

Charlotte Gainsbourg's IRM

by J. Edward Keyes

Nothing prompts an appreciation of life quite like the arrival of death. In 2007, after complaining of headaches for weeks following a water-skiing mishap, Charlotte Gainsbourg was rushed to a Paris hospital where it was discovered that she'd suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Emergency surgery pulled her back from the brink, but the incident impacted her so deeply that it informs the entirety of her third record. The album is called IRM, an acronym for Imagerie par Résonnance Magnétique — what Americans know as an MRI — and, appropriately, its subject matter is a combination of the revealing and the inscrutable. Its tone isn't grim so much as mysterious; its best moments fall somewhere between the fractured electro-funk of Solex and the eerie creep of Portishead, utilizing oddly arranged instruments (ie: the Jackson Pollock spatter of xylophones on "Me and Jane Doe") and sudden minor-key shifts to create an overall mood of unsteadiness.

No small amount of kudos are owed to producer Beck who, after a decade-plus of admirable but emotionally desolate set pieces, has finally found a worthwhile outlet for his windswept death folk. There's something about the flat tonal quality of Beck's voice that conveys an air of indifference, and while that neutrality helped him in the '90s to become an emblem of generational ennui, it's hobbled much of his recent work. One of the larger risks with this endeavor was that Gainsbourg would become just another color on Beck's palette. Instead, Gainsbourg fully inhabits these compositions, winding her way through their dips and slopes. On the icy, twirling "In the End," she balls her voice up so small it could fit on the head of a pin, and the glacial glide of "Vanities" finds her sounding downcast and desolate, clearing the way for a string section any horror-film composer would kill for. Ultimately, IRM feels like the classic near-death experience — songs delivered by the spirit floating above the body on the operating table, reflecting back on all it has seen and wondering aloud about its prospects.

(j_keyes@citypaper.net)