Charlotte Gainsbourg, now an acclaimed French actress perhaps best known in the U.S. for 2003's 21 Grams, made her musical debut as a Lolita-esque nymphet cavorting in bed with her notoriously lascivious father Serge Gainsbourg in 1984's "Lemon Incest". In 1986, Gainsbourg pere penned his daughter's gloopy, synth-accented debut album, Charlotte For Ever, which accompanied a film of the same title.
Now, two decades later, Charlotte returns with her sophomore full-length. It's not the younger Gainsbourg's first time back in the recording studio; her new effort follows film soundtrack contributions in 1996 and 2005, a 2004 duet with French pop singer Étienne Daho, a 2002 guestspot with Badly Drawn Boy, and even a 2001 spoken-word appearance for Madonna (herself a Gainsbourgian provocateur, albeit with a cruder conception of the erotic). Still, on 5:55, Gainsbourg again coos breathlessly in her father's well-worn sophisticate boudoir, adding little to the family musical legacy despite a star-studded supporting cast.
The album's central appeal lies in Gainsbourg's whispery, London-accented vocals. Like her mother, English actress and singer Jane Birkin, Gainsbourg has a limited tonal range that belies her beguiling interpretive powers-- and statuesque je ne sais quois. She can sing of love as surgery on sweaty lavalamp groove "The Operation" without sounding totally creepy, and moan about being "drunk here on the edge of space" on "Af607105" without recalling William Shatner doing "Rocket Man". Her biggest miscue is cool-jazz throwaway "Nocturnal Intermission", which stoops to its title with such murmured dialogue as, "What is your favorite cuss?" and "Which side of the bed do you sleep on?" Gainsbourg has said she did the album in English to avoid coming "too close to my Dad," but her vocals nevertheless inevitably compare unfavorably to her mother's on classics like "Je T'aime...Moi Non Plus" or "Ballade de Melody Nelson".
So, too, Gainsbourg's contributors buckle beneath excessive reverence for the paterfamilias. Nigel Godrich's production dips more deeply into lounge nostalgia than during his work for Air, who proffer their own Serge-besotted talents. Lyricists Jarvis Cocker of Pulp and Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy add their highbrow storytelling and wordplay-- peaking with quips like, "Never fall in love with a body double," or "If I pull this off I'll refuse the Nobel prize"-- though most songs, including drippy acoustic ballad "Beauty Mark" and string-drenched first single "The Songs That We Sing", are atypically generic. A stylish but stilted pastiche, 5:55 follows a decade's worth of mostly superior homages, often involving the same artists. And this is the only immortality the album will share with the year's other Gainsbourg tribute, Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited.
