To Charlotte Gainsbourg's immense credit, she doesn't try to sing as much as intone intimate songs like “5:55,” “Beauty Mark,” and “Somewhere Between Waking and Sleeping.” The closest she comes to actually singing (somewhat beautifully, I might add) is on the charming “The Songs that We Sing,” where she openly wonders, “These songs that I sing/Do they mean anything/To the people I'm singing them to/People like you?” before reassuring herself, “Tonight they do.” She also humorously recounts, “I saw a little girl/I stopped and smiled at her/She screamed and ran away/It happens to me more and more these days.”
The album's most telling moment is “The Operation,” a swaggering cut that sounds like it was recovered from the Moon Safarisessions. In it, Gainsbourg uses surgery as an unwieldy metaphor for . . . well, you can probably guess. It unquestionably shouldn't work, but thanks to her sense of humor, it does. When she moans, “If I pull this off, I'll refuse the Nobel Prize,” you get the impression she's referring to the song more than anything else.
She chose as her collaborators the same team behind Air's Pocket Symphony, and as a result her record lands squarely in the same late night, 70s dream pop genre as her kindred Frenchmen's work.
