Check It. IRM.

The impeccably cool Charlotte Gainsbourg's Beck-produced album, IRM, is out today.

As the child of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, it would be pretty difficult not to be awesome, but it's nevertheless impressive just how right the 38-year-old singer/actress gets it. She's been singing since she was a kid, IRM is her third studio album. While I'm not familiar with Charlotte for Ever or even 5:55, I know Gainsbourg has a way with music from her performance of Bob Dylan's Just Like a Woman on the I'm Not There soundtrack. She played Claire in I'm Not There, opposite Heath Ledger's Robbie. Their chapters are my favorite parts of the film.

In the fall of 2007, Gainsbourg had to undergo emergency surgery at a Paris hospital of a cerebral hemorrhage. IRM is the French acronym for our MRI - Magnetic Resonance Imaging - the machines of which she apparently spent a lot of time in. She fully recovered, and made Antichrist the following summer. And now has an album out that's sure to be fantastic.

-- Leslie Anne Wiggins

Photo credit: www.heartymagazine.com