Charlotte Gainsbourg - Rest
In the last few years, Charlotte Gainsbourg has been so occupied been the muse of Danish genius filmmaker Lars Von Trier, that we almost forget about her musical ambitions. Anyhow, her most iconic characters in cinema (an unstable woman after the loss of her son, a woman that tries to stabilize her depressed sister in the verge of a possible apocalypse, and a woman who explores the freedom and the pains of a life devoted to sex) have contributed to the perception of Gainsbourg as an atypical artist. She might have the same talent as Marion Cotillard, Juliette Binoche or Audrey Tatou, but unlike any of them, she lacks that "French glamour", and instead she appears more like a visceral and raw artist that is never there for the photos and the awards, but for the emotional liberation offered by very challenging art.
Her musical creations match very well her cinema persona, they are complex explorations on the possibilities of synthetic music: her previous album, IRM, went from electropop to industrial obscure minimalism. In her newest single, Rest, Gainsbourg teams with Daft Punk's Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo to create an espectral lullaby that transforms soft and tenders romantic pleads into ethereal meditations on love, memory and possession.
In a song that switches between French and English languages, she choses a word that means different things in both of them to name it. Rest is French for Stay, and Rest is English for Se Reposer. This superposition of the ideas of reposing and remaining allows us to go deeper in the ideas that Gainsbourg lays in her song. The lullaby structure makes it very apt to be a gentle song to send a child to sleep, an idea that is more potent with the dream-pop effects that create an effect of floating in between clouds. But if a lullaby is sung to a baby to make them feel protected and safe, in Rest, Gainsbourg is the fragile figure that pleads "Stay with me, please, don't let me forget you". In any case, for an artist like her, we should also look for macabre after-thoughts in their art. What if this is the song that her character in Antichrist sings to her dead baby?
The intertextuality of Gainsbourg's art reveals intricate levels of complexity to really grasp what lies in between the strings that she has knit so carefully and so precisely to create sensorial experience with the elements that she grasps and borrows from her rich and vast experiences with similar (and very dissimilar, at times) artists. In her new album, besides of Homem Christo, she also works with Paul McCartney and Owen Pallet, to keep expanding the borders of her artistic domains that flirt with the sublime as much as they do with the morbid.
