Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 04/09/06
Label: Because/Atlantic

With genes this cool, who needs friends? Quick recap: Dad is potty-mouthed French pop legend Serge Gainsbourg; mum is English rose turned Left Bank hottie Jane Birkin. Together the 1960s It-couple made X-rated bed-time lullaby "Je T'Aime (Moi Non Plus)" and Charlotte - award-winning actress ("The Cement Garden", "Jane Eyre"), singer (has proffered Gallic guest vocals to Madonna and Badly Drawn Boy) and all-round class act. Nonetheless, the woman does have friends. Handy ones, too. Hello Air, Jarvis Cocker, Neil Hannon and Nigel 'Radiohead' Godrich.

How does such a rich soup of chromosomes and hired help come together? In a tinkly, whispery trinket that deserves a place on the stereo of every right-thinking beatnik. Gorgeous Eurochill drifting along in search of a Sofia Coppola script.
More specifically: from Mum, she gets the English boarding school accent, breathiness and reluctance to hold a tune. From Dad, the occasional foray into shagtastic dim-the-lights bass and synths - and reluctance to hold a tune (no Carter Family this - they must be the least vocally talented singing family ever). Air provide the nuance and atmosphere. Cocker and Hannon supply grade A lyrics and Godrich skippers the whole streamlined ship which sounds as authentically French as to invite further comparisons with both Françoise Hardy and Yann Tiersen.

So where is Charlotte herself in all of this? Everywhere. She is the mysterious, tentatively romantic yet world-weary narrator, slipping from French to English and back again over a shimmery background of simple, stylish piano riffs and understated electronics. The title track sees her ponder in cashmere-soft tones the "too early" / "too late" dilemma of finding yourself awake at dawn. "AF607105" offers the most affecting depiction of long haul flight-induced melancholia since A Camp (aka Nina Persson)'s "Frequent Flyer". "The Songs That We Sing" frames her as a reserved Parisian Kirsty MacColl, and Serge would have approved of "Nocturnal Intermission"'s suggestive title and experimentalism (she mumbles to herself over a "Shaft"-like bed of soul jazz).

"Everything I Cannot See", however, is the album's poetic and musical pinnacle - impressionistic waves of piano and intimate lines of devotion ("As the ocean crawls onto the shoreline / So you lap at the edges of me") all build up slowly, tidally to a visceral, killer chorus that gets killier (hmmmm - Reviews Ed) with every reprise. "5:55" is not her first foray into the music industry. At the age of 14 Gainsbourg Jnr released the notorious "Lemon Incest" (aka "Charlotte Forever") with her father - an experience which, unsurprisingly, left her disinclined to get reacquainted with the family business for another two decades.

If there's no follow-up from this reclusive dame within the next five years we'll be wanting words with Godrich.

    by Anna Britten