It was a brave, animalistic performance, much edgier than anything Jane Birkin would have attempted. Birkin's charm comes from her sweet whimsicality, her girlish skittishness and touching capacity for wonder. Gainsbourg may have inherited more of her father's melancholic sophistication if perhaps not his rapid shots of provocative humour. Her first album as an adult, 5 55, released in 2006, was composed by Air and carried all the traces of their coffee-table loungecore. Admittedly it was rather gorgeous at times, with Gainsbourg intoning Jarvis Cocker's lyrics in her quiet, Chelsea influenced voice as if she'd only read them for the first time. The songs were glass objects one guesses her father would have smashed to suit his own identity, but his daughter was sticking steadfast to the rule book, as if she wasn't completely sure this was her domain.
When no one is looking (or searching) context can be everything. For IRM, Gainsbourg has teamed up with Beck, that arch wizard of juxtaposition. A collaboration seemed inevitable, since the lushly despairing Sea Change was opaquely a fond tribute to Serge Gainsbourg's droll masterpiece of sleazy, string drenched funk Histoire de Melody Nelson. Luckily IRM avoids retro gloss by focusing on the singer herself, who sounds liberated and chasing her own dreams in the process.
What different costumes can an actress wear? How many styles can she collect to express herself? Let me count the ways. On the title track she blankly surveys the brain hemorrhage she suffered while surrounding metallic noises jabber and threaten mortality. Heaven Can Wait takes an oblique walk into the uncharted waters of Bob Marley Jamming at a baroque ball. Distorting her fragile voice in nursery rhyme post punk, Greenwich Mean Time offers a brief respite to the forbidding rapture. Two souls circle each other round the dressing up box, trying to figure out what is illusion, what is truth. A delightful set of sketches never offering a full picture, perhaps only a glimpse of directions to take. Beck's father David Campbell often contributes superb scores here, who can resist a pop album that closes to a cascading waltz of Steve Reich-like Piano Phases.
