Wireless Bollinger - Home

IRM

Charlotte Gainsbourg

Score:83

Reviewer: Ed Butler

Label: Because Music (Europe), New Elektra (USA)

Reviewed: Mar 15th '10, Released:2010

Beck’s musical output has been consistently waning of late. Since 2002’s Seachange, there has been continually diminishing returns from Guero, The Information and Modern Guilt, as each subsequent release seemed to merely offer an increasingly hazy facsimile of earlier triumphs. Even when there was some experimentation, such as the electronic meddling on the second half of The Information, it felt tacked-on rather than embodying the all-encompassing genre-madness of Beck’s finest outings. So it seems appropriate that the best Beck album in nearly a decade comes not from Beck, but a French chanteuse with the kind of musical lineage most could only wish for.

Charlotte Gainsbourg, unlike her composer/collaborator, is on a hot streak. Whether her Canne-winning starring role in the highly controversial Lars von Trier film has anything to do with her newfound fame or not, her new role as Beck’s muse is a winning one. While the liner notes suggest IRM is a collaboration, this is almost entirely a Beck album through a new vessel. Aside from co-writing some lyrics, Gainsbourg appears only as a voice on an album written, mixed and produced by the silent partner.

And it works. Be it her oh-so French coo on ‘Le Chat Du Café Des Artistes’, or her utter ownership of the lone Beck duet ‘Heaven Can Wait’, Gainsbourg adds lashings of soul and vibrancy to the kind of material that Beck has been screwing up for years. Even down to the vocalisations that sound distinctly Beck-like on album opener ‘Master’s Hands’, Gainsbourg owns every second of IRM (a title taken from Gainsbourg’s inspiration for the album – an MRI scan, which is IRM in French).

In retrospect, it makes total sense that Beck and Gainsbourg have worked so well together. Anyone who has heard Gainsbourg’s father’s Historie de Melody Nelson and Beck’s ‘Paper Tiger’ (and now, incidentally, ‘Master’s Hands’) can point to the reverence the family must be held in. But it is truly to Gainsbourg that the kudos must be directed. To take an album predominantly written by another artist, then perform it under your own name is a risky endeavour. But on IRM, there is never any doubt; Beck may have his fingerprints all over it, but this is a Charlotte Gainsbourg album. Top to bottom.