Charlotte Gainsbourg: “IRM”

A certain amount of context comes with the name of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s new album, IRM. IRM, the French acronym for imagerie par résonance magnétique (equivalent of the English MRI) was Gainsbourg’s original inspiration for the album. I’m lucky enough to have never had any reason to be anywhere near an MRI machine, so I can’t relate firsthand. But, Gainsbourg on the other hand, became very familiar with the experience. After a water-skiing accident in 2007, she was rushed to the hospital for a brain hemorrhage and underwent numerous procedures. Fittingly, the album takes a cerebral approach.

In the tube, Gainsbourg began to think about music – not a common reaction, I’m sure. She heard the sounds of the machine and used them in her songs. This is most obvious in the album’s title track, where the whirling whines of an MRI machine are used for droning instrumentation. In the song, Gainsbourg sings: “Analyze EKG/Can you see a memory?/Register all my fear/On a flowchart disappear.” Indeed the experience must have been at least semi-traumatic, but Gainsbourg maintains strong throughout the entire album. On numerous occasions, she almost seems to challenge an entity, though it is not always obvious to whom she is singing.

The opening track, “Master’s Hands,” acts as a call to her own mind, telling it to do the things that are meant to be involuntary: “Breathe out, come alive/Give me a reason to feel.” “Time of the Assassins” repeats, “In the time of the assassins they say ‘Hallelujah.’” And, on “Trick Pony” – my favorite IRM track – Gainsbourg is backed by 50s-style harmonies, singing, “A trick pony/He don’t know me/He don’t know me at all.” There isn’t a clear picture of who she is singing to, but I imagine that after a string of invasive procedures, the idea of personal space would lose some of its permanen Song meanings range from detectable references to obscure ramblings. However, the origins of both the lyrics and music are quite clear. With the exception of Jean-Pierre Ferland’s “Le Chat Du Café Des Artistes,” all songs were written and produced by Beck in his Los Angeles home studio. The problem is, once you know this, it is impossible to overlook.

I made the mistake of doing a little bit of research before I listened to IRM (which I suppose I may be forcing on some of you as I write this), and I found myself constantly discerning between what was Gainsbourg and what was Beck. It is as if Beck had leftover arrangements from Modern Guilt and Sea Change, and he finally found his muse in French pop singer form. Now, I’m a huge fan of Sea Change so it’s nice to hear what is basically an installment of Beck’s trilogy, but to call IRM a Charlotte Gainsbourg album is a stretch – it is undeniably a collaboration.

Beck offers his overlying strings and often eerie melodies, both of which accompany Gainsbourg’s understated voice – most of the time. But I felt that there were moments when the album relied too heavily on Beck’s ability to get away with stripped down arrangements. “Me And Jane Doe” consists of sporadic instrumentation and Gainsbourg singing Kimya Dawson-style, making the track more annoying than anything. Also, the album doesn’t flow as much as I would like. It only picks up the pace a few times, and those rare moments simply do not sustain the atmosphere the way I think they should. Though, I don’t necessarily see this as a fault. An album based on head trauma and the thoughts that (I would imagine) stem from it should probably be introspective and, consequently, dismal. It just comes down to a preference of style.

Despite a few low points, IRM is a strong collaboration between two artists that mold well together. As an album, it isn’t perfect, but as a thought experiment, it’s an experience worth having.