Actress Charlotte Gainsbourg may be the daughter of the ultimate Euro-glam couple, Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, but her current Beck collaboration, IRM, is a tough-minded trip through some serious adult trauma: the 2007 cerebral hemorrhage that nearly killed her. Let’s face it, Charlotte Gainsbourg’s predilection for sophisticated Francophonic pop music can be considered a birthright. A few tracks into her latest record, though, it becomes clear she’s more than just the sum of her famous genes. Thus, IRM is a well crafted alternative informed pop record. The songs are tightly bound orbs of pop with a lot of character and great substance. A brain hemorrhage following a water-skiing accident inspired IRM, but references to the accident are mostly oblique – all the better, since the random horror-movie stingers and ping-ponging percussion of a track like Vanities evoke someone’s last day on Earth better than anything so frank as a lyric.