Arctic Reviews

Charlotte Gainsbourg was last seen mutilating her genitals in Lars Von Trier's mind-fucking movie Antichrist, controversial yes, but then when your singing career began as a thirteen year old dueting with your dad on a track entitled Lemon Incest, the dividing line betwen anglo-gallic misinterpretation and moral turpitude has for some been well and truly crossed.

If Gainsbourg - as I'm sure the god-fearing had suggested - had seen the events of 2007 as a sign, there was little evidence of it in Antichrist, a relentlessly confrontational piece of exploitationism. Perhaps she perceived her role as a mother whose infant son dies and subsequently goes insane as some form of rehabilitation, as two years before following a minor water-skiing accident, the then thirty-seven year old suffered a near fatal brain haemorhrage.

Following her recovery the seeds of IRM (French for MRI) were then developed in harness with producer Beck, who professed his role as muse was to empathetically do little more than "Guess what she wanted to sing about". The results are fractured, but never maudlin. Whilst it may have been natural to understandably dwell on the past, there's very little evidence of self pity, although songs entitled Heaven Can Wait or Me And Jane Doe are clearly experiential in nature.

For the most part Gainsbourg appears torn between claiming her birthright as a classicist pop chanteuse and wanting to reinvent as something far more avant garde. At times she defies even these easy cliches, such as on opener Masters Hands, her dreamy, iridescent vocals contrasting with stacatto processing and strings, whilst the title track - inspired by the brutal crack of the MRI scanning machine in which she spent so many reformatory moments - is equally glitchy, recalling Stereolab at their most confrontational.

Both are exception rather than rule. You might expect more the child-like melodies of Vanities, whilst Time of The Assasins seductively recalls the ingenue score for The Virgin Suicides. And yet there's a nascent sense of experimentation; Greenwich Mean Time is filled with the distorted vowels of Pere Ubu's post-punk essays, whilst Trick Pony metes out harmonic justice on The Kills.

Probably the biggest compliment to be paid to IRM is that despite homegrown concerns about Beck's Ros-Bifs affiliations, it's an obstinately un-American record. With a palette of worthy influences but lacking focus, it doesn't however make a case for either Ms.Gainsbourg being a singer who acts, or alternatively an actress who sings.