Artist: Charlotte Gainsbourg
Album: IRM
Released: Nov 2009
Label: Elektra Records
Genre: experimental pop
Purchase date: 09 Jan 2011
Format: AAC files
Source: iTunes
I had known that the Anglo-French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg also had a singing career, but I hadn't paid it much mind, as there are so many actors who use their fame to attempt to cash in on meager musical tallent. Then, I heard an interview with her on on World Cafe last June, and I was really struck by the music. IRM, her third album, had been on my wish list since then, and I finally got around to buying it with some extra iTunes credits.
This emotional album is a loose concept album about Gainsbourg's near-death experience in 2007 after an apparently-minor water skiing mishap. Two weeks after the accident, she walked into a hospital in Paris complaining of dizziness, blurred vision, and severed headaches, and discovered that she had a slow cerebral hemorrhage, and her skull was filling with blood. She was immediately rushed in for brain surgery. ("IRM" is the French acronym for the medical scanner called "MRI" in English).
Produced by Beck, the musical styles are all over the map. There is a touching ballad, an alt-rocker, a French cabaret number, and some electronic tracks which Gainsbourg half-raps over. She doesn't have a broad vocal range, but the stylistic changes and overall mood of the record more than compensate. The theme of the album is the thin line between life and death, and how close we all are, but how life has a way of going on regardless.
It's kind of Zen, but all-in-all, I liked this record.
Rating: B+
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