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Album reviews Music

Charlotte Gainsbourg

Rating: NNN


Charlotte Gainsbourg’s third album is an eclectic, unsettling collection of 13 songs sung in English and French and inspired in part by a water-skiing accident that led to the actor/singer/daughter of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin undergoing emergency surgery for a cerebral hemorrhage in 2007.

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Gainsbourg’s voice is gorgeous and intimate, sometimes swinging seductively low. But she left the songwriting, lyrics and production to Beck, who is a massive fan of her father and used her input to guide the writing process. Last time, she hired Air in a similar role, and their influence is still felt here.

Delicate, dreary early-album tunes give way to the gentle ballad In The End and the lively Beck duet Heaven Can Wait. Later, Trick Pony and Greenwich Mean Time, with their tribal drumming, stuttering electronic beats and abstract lyrics, sound like a Beck album featuring a guest vocalist. This isn’t a bad thing.

Top track: In The End

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