LaRM day 165 (Peter Gabriel-Charlotte Gainsbourg)

Woo-hoo, it's a gigantic Serge-fest on the horizon!  First we have to finish of old baldy Peter Gabriel and do a few of Serge's girl's albums.  Gabriel's 2010 effort was the orchestra, piano and strained voice combo of covers album, Scratch My Back.  Now the price of vanity is scorn from some, and unfortunately Gabriel hadn't cemented the deal with this.  The idea was that he would record an album of songs by other artists, and each of those artists would simultaneously record covers of Gabriel's songs.  Nice idea, but the fact that the other artists album would be called You Scratch Mine smacks of arrogance, and that coupled with the fact that it hadn't occurred to Gabriel that they might not want to join in or might be annoyed by his covers of their work also seems not to have crossed his mind.  The result? Well, Thom Yorke was apparently so aghast at Gabriel's version of 'Street Spirit' that he immediately pulled out, Bowie said he simply wasn't interested, the Arcade Fire had "conflicting arrangements", etc. So far, so dicey and the You Scratch Mine project ended up being the release of a few songs on iTunes.  Ah well, it's actually a little bit of a shame because although Scratch My Back is almost aggressively brainy in its approach and undeniably mature (ie, very po-facedly grown-up) in its execution, it is an interesting and arresting record.  Every song, from Paul Simon's bouncy 'Boy in the Bubble' to the Magnetic Fields' 'The Book of Love' is boiled down to its emotional core and stretched out and presented as stately musical statement.  What's cleverest about it is that it takes the central melodic theme of every song and then presents the whole thing as if it were written to be presented with such depth.  Gabriel himself is in good voice and the orchestral settings for the most part work very well.  There are points at which you feel that he made the job a little easy for himself (Elbow's 'Mirrorball' is not, in truth, a million miles away from his own style of vocal melody) but on the whole it's a surprisingly effective set of covers, especially considering that the idea of a 2010 covers album by Peter Gabriel sounds like one of the worst things imaginable.

Charlotte Gainsbourg may have made a highly respectable name for herself as an actress, but as a singer, mneh.  Anyway, the reason that she really ever came to anybody's attention is because at 13 her lascivious old provocateur dad Serge made her roll around in her undies with him in the video for their duet single 'Lemon Incest'.  Pretty gruesome, but we'll get on to old Serge a bit later.  At 14 she released a pretty dismal pop album and a couple of singles and then went into acting full-time, only returning to the recording studio in 2006 for the album 5:55.  I remember that 5:55 got great reviews when it came out, but listening to it now it's all a little underwhelming and really it may have been more to do with the cameo star power than the record itself that got the attention.  Most of the material on the album was written by Jarvis Cocker and there are contributions from Air and the Divine Comedy, as well as the whole thing having super-producer Nigel Godrich twiddling the knobs.  The sound is a kind of lacy twilit drift with the gently ethereal keyboard washes and reverb-heavy extra instrumentation that Air specialise in being the order of the day for the majority of the record.  Gainsbourg's voice is not dissimilar to her mother Jane Birkin's, it's a breathy, fairly tuneless thing but which it's possible to utilise to good effect in these wispy musical settings. There are some great delicate songs, including the surprisingly poppy 'The Operation' and 'The Songs That We Sing', and as befits Jarvis and Neil Hannon's particular world views, the lyrics are biting and cynical, particularly about relationships.

Gainsbourg's next album, 2009's IRM is easily the best record that Beck has made in the last few years.  Effectively IRM is a Beck album in every sense but the vocals, and although it doesn't sound like his post-modern stylistic mash-ups, it still has his idiosyncratic signature all over it.  The fact that he has adapted and moulded his own sound to create something specific for Gainsbourg is proof that he's still got stuff to do, which is a relief because I thought he was pretty much washed-up by 2009.  But it's not just Gainsbourg's voice and her name on the cover that defines her role - the title is a reference to the life-threatening injury she sustained in 2007 necessitating many MRI scans - and her presence on the record is considerably more than perfunctory, her vocals and her personality being the real core of the album.  IRM is a marked improvement on 5:55's late-night bohemianism, being a dark and adventurous record, full of funny noises, thudding and fractured rhythms and disconcertingly oblique lyrics.  There are off-kilter blues numbers ('Dandelion'), creepy mood setters ('Vanities' and maddeningly unnerving closer 'La Collectioneuse'), indefinably ethnic string-led songs ('Voyage'), screwy folk ('Me and Jane Doe'), amongst all kinds of other things.  The whole record is a slinky, creepy thing and it really is quite, quite brilliant.

Charlotte's most recent release is the peculiar Stage Whisper (2011) which is eight studio songs, off-cuts from the other two albums and new tunes, and a live set from 2010.  The studio tracks all sound like decent but not quite as good songs from the albums (with the exception of 'Got To Let Go' which sounds like a low-key track from a Noah & the Whale album, unsurprising bearing in mind Charlie Fink wrote and oversaw it) and the live stuff is also pretty good, but not so remarkable as to get overly excited about.  Stage Whisper is interesting enough and just about warrants a release for its contents, but it definitely has the air of a stop-gap release.

I think I'll leave it there for now though so we get two clear days of pure Serge from tomorrow.