In Melancholia, Lars von Trier’s apocalyptic 2011 film, Charlotte Gainsbourg portrays a woman struggling to pull her sister from the throes of mental illness. Her performance is raw, devastating, and revealing of the singer/actress’ artistic fascination with darkness. There’s also a grim sort of prescience to the role—Gainsbourg’s own half-sister, the photographer Kate Barry, died in late 2013, after falling from a window. Her death was presumed to be a suicide.
As it has for so many artists—like Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum on this year’s A Crow Looked At Me, or Sufjan Stevens on 2015’s Carrie & Lowell—Gainsbourg’s grief took up residence in her music. The groundwork for an album, her follow-up to 2009’s IRM, had already been laid when tragedy struck; in its aftermath, the project recentered around reckoning with loss. Gainsbourg decamped to New York to escape the ghosts that trailed her in Paris (where she also lost her father, famed singer Serge Gainsbourg, in 1991). There, producer SebastiAn, known for his work with Frank Ocean, joined her for a year’s worth of writing and recording sessions during which, he reports, she “wanted to make something with all this sadness she had.”
Gainsbourg, though, showed little interest in delivering ecclesiastical murmurs like Stevens’, or a heart-wrenching catalog of detail like Elverum’s. The album that emerged from these sessions, Rest, is at once scorchingly intimate and fantastically oversized. Gainsbourg mourns by leaning into her cinematic sensibilities, cushioning her pain with orchestral swells and dramatic synth. With SebastiAn, she’s dreamt up a sonic palette that wouldn’t feel out of place in a horror film—take, for instance, “I’m a Lie,” which pairs a vaguely Halloween-like synth hook with French lyrics about the distressing physiological effects of desire. On the six-minute epic “Deadly Valentine,” Gainsbourg interpolates wedding vows in an unnerving, half-whispered vocal performance supported by sweeping strings that heighten the drama of the demented nuptials. One poster for Melancholia, that haunting image of Kirsten Dunst floating through murky water in full bridal regalia, seems like a fitting visual aid for the song. Gainsbourg’s grief is vast, and she’s writing accordingly.
For non-Francophones, it might be tempting to brush past the French lyrics that appear on this record, and certainly, there’s a hushed urgency in Gainsbourg’s delivery that maps out her tone. But the songs on Rest are some of the first whose lyrics Gainsbourg has penned on her own, and every word craves attention. She pulls off stunning bilingual wordplay on the album’s title track, co-written and produced by Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo—the English title, “Rest,” evokes eternal rest, while the French variant that Gainsbourg sings, “reste,” means “stay.” Of all the songs on the album, this one was written in closest proximity to Barry’s passing; it sees Gainsbourg simultaneously laying her sister to rest and imploring her to come back (“Reste avec moi s’il te plaît” translates to “Stay with me please”). The all-French elegy “Kate” makes a similar plea: “On d’vait vieillir ensemble,” meaning “We should grow old together.”
Of course, writing through grief doesn’t have to mean writing about grief. Tragedy doesn’t erase human complexity, so even as sadness is central to this album, notes of twisted romance, familial love, and fervent restlessness fill out its songs. “Sylvia Says,” a perplexingly funky but delightful homage to “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” builds a Revolution-worthy bass groove into Sylvia Plath’s lovesick verse from 1953. In the lush, string-fueled “Dans Vos Airs” (“In Your Expressions”), Gainsbourg reflects on motherhood. “Songbird in a Cage,” the only song of the set that she had no hand in writing, was given to her by Paul McCartney (who takes a guest turn on piano, drums, and guitar); it lays listless phrases, alternately spoken with cool detachment and sung in quiet earnestness, over a stuttering beat and guitar hiccups.
Songs like these affirm life, even in the face of death. They transform personal suffering into public spectacle. Few things are more terrifying than exposing our bruises to others, knowing that they could misunderstand, or prey on our vulnerability. On Rest, Gainsbourg doesn’t just reveal her pain, but monumentalizes it, lays out a red carpet, and invites people to watch. Her refusal to be sequestered by grief is, quite literally, a death-defying feat.
