Album of the Week: Charlotte Gainsbourg

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Album of the Week: Charlotte Gainsbourg

Rest Out Now via Because Music

Nov 17, 2017 Charlotte Gainsbourg By Christopher Roberts

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French singer/actress Charlotte Gainsbourg released a new album, Rest, today via Because Music. Often for our Album of the Week posts we have an especially written detailed write up on why the album is the week’s best, but while that wasn’t possible this week we still wanted to acknowledge Rest as our favorite album of the week in a more casual post.

Rest is the follow-up to 2006’s 5:55 (a collaboration with Air, Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, and The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon) and 2009’s IRM (a collaboration with Beck). Unlike those albums, for Rest Gainsbourg wrote the lyrics herself.

Previously Gainsbourg shared a self-directed video for Rest‘s title track, which was co-written and produced by Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (it was one of our Songs of the Week), as well as a self-directed video for “Deadly Valentine” that co-starred Dev Hynes, aka Blood Orange, and featured her two daughters playing younger versions of Gainsbourg (it was our #1 Song of the Week). Then she shared another song from the album, “Ring-a-Ring O’ Roses,” which is partially a play off the classic playground nursery rhyme, as well as a self-directed video for the song.

Rest also features collaborations with Paul McCartney (who composed and wrote the album’s “Songbird in a Cage”), Owen Pallett, and Connan Mockasin. While “Rest” was produced by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, the rest of Rest was produced by SebastiAn (Frank Ocean, Kavinsky). A press release says Gainsbourg and SebastiAn were inspired by the music of Giorgio Moroder, as well as various movie soundtracks, “particularly Pino Donaggio’s score for Brian De Palma’s ‘70s horror classic Carrie, Georges Delerue’s music for Jean-Luc Godard’s nouvelle vague masterpiece Le Mépris, as well as the unsettling ambience of films like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Hitchcock’s Rebecca.”

Read our review of Rest.

Read our 2010 interview with Charlotte Gainsbourg.