 Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck make a very interesting pair. She, the beautiful, yet fragile looking French actress/singer who is no stranger to shock - made her singing debut at 12 with a controversial duet with her father called 'Lemon Incest' and recently appearing in the grim Antichrist as a deranged mother who disfigures herself and her husband - he, with his cryptic lyrics and unending samples, perhaps the greatest pop collagist this side of David Bowie.
IRM in turn is therefore, both experimental and yet extremely pretty in places. Beck and Gainsbourg bring out the best in each other: The delights are manifold, his masterful production so in tune and wide-ranging, her voice, emotional, sexy and playful where it has to be, each song shifting familiar and forgotten sounds into colorful, unpredictable combinations.
The album starts out with 'Masters Hands' that sounds, strangely, like a South Indian film's soundtrack with all its Malayalam sounding percussion, while Gainsbourg purrs and hallucinates.
The title track, which is frightening annoying clatter, is the centre piece of Gainsbourg's collaboration with Beck. Written after a water-skiing accident in 2007, it forced Gainsbourg through several MRIs ("imagerie par resonance magnetique") to diagnose a brain hemorrhage. Atop lyrics such as "Leave my head demagnetized/Tell me where the trouble lies", the song samples scanners, features a jumpy drum kit and replicates the peculiar mind-numbing experience of hanging out in a hospital for long periods of time.
'Le Chat Du Café Des Artistes' is a subtle number in French and it sounds sexy, turning dark and sinister near the end when the orchestra reaches a crescendo, screeching and being assaulted by sudden pangs of guitar frenzy and fast drum rolls.
'In The End', which is criminally short, is a sleepy lullaby of a song, with Charlotte's voice, a gentle hush, accompanied by gently plucked guitars, accordions, strings and maracas swaying in the background.
With lyrics like "Heaven can wait/And Hell's too far to go/Somewhere between what you need and what you know/And they're trying to drive that escalator into the ground," 'Heaven Can Wait', can sound misleading but with its cabaret piano and 60's style horn section, its a bumbling show tune duet between Beck and Charlotte and they are clearly having fun.
'On Me and Jane Doe', Gainsbourg is plaintive and playful, she sings "If I had my way I'd cross the desert to the sea/Learn to speak in tongues/Something that makes sense to you and to me." It sounds somehow like someone's childhood snapshot, taken on a beach in Jamaica, filled with xylophones and drumming that flutters between speakers.
There might be other reasons to listen to the 'Time Of The Assasins', but make it just one, the harmony parts that come and go, and make you wait for them once more.
Filled with shoddy sounding drumbeats, delicious arrays of guitar licks and the reverb drenched atmosphere of a parking lot late at night, 'Trick Pony' is all surreal, stiletto naughtiness, with Gainsbourg announcing not to "come back again" to a psychotic lover and uttering such innuendoes as "pull the trigger and see your shadow loving."
What sounds like rubber bands being played by long fingernails and various tiny voice samples is what opens 'Greenwich Mean Times'. The strangeness doesn't end there, as Gainsbourg starts to sing about living in a crooked house with a crooked cat and mouse. They "stick together like dirty horse flies", it's a song that you think might erupt into something menacing but it doesn't.
-- Ali Sulta |
