Review: After a near fatal-accident, Charlotte Gainsbourg finds peace with new album ‘IRM’

Review: Gainsbourg puts out ‘IRM’ after injury

Charlotte Gainsbourg, “IRM” (Because Music)

If you like emotionally raw, folksy, French-infused pop, Charlotte Gainsbourg provides a work that will make your brain bleed. And this is no accident. Gainsbourg’s third album, “IRM,” is inspired by a head injury and subsequent near-death experience she sustained in 2007 after a skiing accident (”IRM” is the French — and backward — equivalent of MRI ).

As concept albums go, “IRM” delivers. Influenced by her injury and recovery, each track is consequently in the ambient rhythm of an MRI scanner.

“Master’s Hands” is downright clinical, like a medical poster in a doctor’s office: “Hold my head up, right foot back/ take my hands down, shake my back…” The title track “IRM” is the most literal interpretation on the album, with Gainsbourg drolly singing, “Take a picture, what’s inside?/ Ghost image in my mind/ Neural pattern like a spider/ Capillary to the center.”

“IRM” also invokes Gainsbourg’s French roots with “Le Chat du Cafe des Artistes,” and “La Collectionneuse,” silent homage to her musician father, Serge Gainsbourg. Each song is still wrapped in the warbling embrace of the omnipresent scanner, almost as if the MRI machine is now a part of her makeup, just as her Franco-heritage.

And if tracks like “Heaven Can Wait” sound like a bluesy Beck B-side, that’s because Beck’s musical signature is drafted throughout “IRM.” The anti-folk hero wrote the music for and produced the record with Gainsbourg, while contributing vocals as well.

Their forces combined, Beck and Gainsbourg have compiled a subliminal folk melange for head trauma wards the world over.

CHECK THIS OUT: “Trick Pony 1,” a delightfully cacophonic anthem replete with swampy, rough guitars conflicting with airy, detached vocals, remind us that two great -if not disparate- tastes can taste great together.