Charlotte Gainsbourg
Album: Stage Whisper
Label: Because Music
Tracks: 19
Website: www.charlottegainsbourg.com

By her own admission, Charlotte Gainsbourg is more of an actress than a singer… and happy for it. That said, her 2010 collection IRM was mightily impressive, the more so because it was also a high water mark for her collaborator Beck - who donated and created quite possibly his finest material for the best part of a decade.

This album rounds up four new songs and four IRM offcuts, as well as a live set largely made of IRM material.

Let's dispense with the stage stuff first. Given her own assertion that singing is not her comfort zone, it should come as not surprise to find her voice is blank and distant, lacking in timbre and pale of emotion. She's got a great band behind her, but only in the fluid time signatures and deft rhythms of Jamais does she sound at all at home - although the cover of Just Like A Woman is knowlingly remote.

Perhaps you have to be in the room to really get Charlotte Gainsbourg live - or maybe like her parents she's simply a better studio performer because the other eight tracks here are strafed with interesting motifs and intriguing deliveries. Of the Beck tunes, the opening salvo of Terrible Angels and Paradisco occupy the glammed-up funk R&B that has pre-occupied Mr Hansen in recent years, before giving way to the perfectly charming autumnal maxi dress tones of All the Rain and White Telephone.

Noah and the Whale's Charlie Fink provides a surprisingly effective foil for Gainsbourg's voice on Got To Let Go, while Connan Mockasin beefs up the dislocated psyche of Out Of Touch and Villagers' Conor O'Brien plays to the vacant strength of her voice on Memoir, but perhaps the best - certainly the most immediate - track here is the lead single, Anna.

By turns delicious and dislocated, Stage Whisper perfectly casts the singer as enigma. Oh, those French…

Nick Churchill
www.thegranvillechambers.co.uk