Charlotte Gainsbourg
IRM
Charlotte Gainsbourg has released 3 albums in her lifetime, one when she was a teenager after recording “Lemon Incest” at 13 with her father, Serge (it's okay to feel weird about that one, by the way). Then she released an album produced by Nigel Godrich, with songs written by Air and Jarvis Cocker, which was... pretty okay. Gainsbourg is more famous (and accomplished) as an actress. Beck has spent the better part of this decade (aka everything after Sea Change) rudderless, making a bunch of albums that all tried to imitate Odelay’s disco-cowboy bouillabaisse approach to genre while keeping his Sea Change/Mutations tone. Each album meant diminishing returns, and there was talk about Beck getting old, about how Scientology had got to him, that the protracted ego cage match with Wayne Coyne on the Sea Change tour had taken a lot out of him, lots of things. The truth is Beck has simply hit the second decade of his career and was having trouble maintaining, which is what happens to everyone. Sometimes it’s one album and sometimes it’s a whole string of “okay-to-middling-to-bad” until they hit a wake-up call. You can’t forget that IRM was released immediately after Gainsbourg starred in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, with a performance which nastily erased any concept of a character that any audience had about her. And Beck, he spent 2009/10 collaborating with anyone and everyone, doing the Record Club covers project, movie soundtracks, producing Jamie Lidell and guest-vocalizing for Tobacco. This collaboration was something each of them needed, coming along right when each of them was stuck in a shit or get off the pot position - Gainsbourg on the edge of being branded a dilettante, Beck of being a career rock star.
They pulled it off. IRM is kind of a 2010 take on Lee Hazelwood writing and producing for Nancy Sinatra, where each of them are exchange being the more dominant voice from song to song, the end result being an album that feels like it couldn’t exist without both of their involvement. IRM has a lot of the hallmarks of Beck’s work - Nick Drake-influenced chamber-pop, trancey space-folk, emotionally brittle orchestral detours, unconventional percussion, instruments copying the sound of machinery and sampled machinery mimicking instruments, distorto-noise, lo-fi boom bap, 60s/70s country, lyrics that are oblique and anthemic. You could argue that this is Beck’s follow-up album to Modern Guilt, but that disregards that Beck’s approach, while idiosyncratic, leaves so much open for the right artist to fill. Whatever impression 5:55 left of Charlotte Gainsbourg (and it couldn’t have been much) has been forgotten in the intervening years, so she’s creating an identity from scratch. What separates her most from Beck’s songwriting is that personality. Her wry humor in delivery, and, honestly, her commitment to embodying these songs. With Beck, even at his best, there is a manufactured distance to every word. That’s part of his appeal. When the words get strange on IRM, that distance isn’t there - so something like “Heaven Can Wait” or “Trick Pony” would be about the sounds on the track, the way the song is composed, how it was being sung. Here both songs are windows into a fragmented thought process rather than an attempt at replicating the same. On “Vanities”, where Beck one-ups his Nigel Godrich/Scott Walker production influences, the result is secondary to how quietly and slowly Gainsbourg sings the emotions not the words. She’s not a diva or a conduit, she’s not going to bust into melisma on one of these tracks. She sings with a slight accent, and often fights to not be buried under the overzealous production. IRM is Gainsbourg achieving artistic maturity. On 5:55 it felt like she was Air and Cocker’s idea of a chanteuse to work out their pop fixations (her parents wrote “Je T’aime... Moi Non Plus” zomg), and while for all we know Beck is working with her for the same reasons , he can’t really do anything but write Beck songs. That’s the only skill set he’s developed. In doing so here, he’s allowed a space for Charlotte Gainsbourg to become Charlotte Gainsboug. It turned out that’s something both of them desperately needed.
-Sean Witzke, 2010
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