Charlotte Gainsbourg - 'IRM' (Because Music) Released 25/01/2010

It probably makes sense to start this review with a proviso – although Charlotte Gainsbourg’s third album is officially billed as entirely her own, within a few minutes of the first listen Beck’s influence becomes immediately apparent. Although officially acting only as producer, IRM is far more of a collaborative effort between the duo, from the music’s disjointed, cut up psychedelia to her occasionally oblique lyrical stylings. Given the history of the album’s inception – a near-fatal illness and post-traumatic breakdown – Beck’s typically schizophrenic backing tracks enshroud her often uncomfortably intimate musings in a strangely appropriate manner.

Even at its most extrovert, Beck’s music has always exuded a sense of awkwardness – even the highly-strung sex funk of Midnite Vultures felt like a (admittedly fantastic) square peg in a round hole. What’s interesting about his collaboration with Gainsbourg is how well his magpie like tendencies match her newfound role as ice queen – for the most part IRM is the sound of a human confronting her own mortality, and coming across as incredibly vulnerable in the process. But perhaps it’s this aspect that almost makes it infinitely more compelling than her previous musical forays - opener ‘Master’s Hand’ escalates before receding, her urgent requests to “drill my brain all full of holes” falling on deaf ears as the music remains strangely subdued.

On title track ‘IRM’ – French for MRI, in case you were wondering – Beck samples the eponymous machine’s alien whirr to create a strangely unsettling and ever-shifting backdrop to Gainsbourg’s dramatic stage whispers. It takes until third song ‘Le Chat Du Café Des Artistes’ for her mother tongue to emerge, and with it the vulnerability previously disguised behind a coolly implacable exterior. Its melodramatic string backing says more than a terrible grasp of GCSE French ever could, rising to distorted climax and dissipating into the close-knit folk warmth of ‘In The End’.

Yet the very qualities that make IRM so much more engaging than anything else Gainsbourg has recorded – the sweet tension between its unashamedly confessional nature and her tendency towards implacable delivery – also impart a distance between listener and artist. It’s this slightly voyeuristic edge that could certainly out off casual listeners. On the whole, IRM deflects immediate rewards, in favour of gradually unfolding riches. But once discovered they’re certainly there – ‘Vanities’ is a petite and fragile wisp of a thing, consisting of little more than sparse guitar and washes of delicate string ambience, yet carries a shocking emotional punch. Further explorations merely serve to confirm the notion that, just like an MRI scan, the closer you look the more you uncover.