Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week it's Charlotte Gainsbourg's album 5:55 which you can purchase here. Listen to "Songs That We Sing" from the record below and read about it after the jump.



Recently in GQ, Jean Touitou, the founder of clothing line APC, said about his aesthetic that he tries “very hard to have no details.” This plain aesthetic is different than a minimal one in that it is not about a reduction in embellishment, but simply in an eschewing of unnecessary adornment. This is basically what I value in everything; an overall personal motto of blatant regularity mixed with effusive class. Touitou is talking about jeans (that I am wearing now, and that I have been wearing every day for a very long time) and there is a calm expectancy to his style, a sense that he has found a very medium perfection. It’s for this standard precision that I love Charlotte Gainsbourg’s beautifully usual 2007 album, 5:55.

5:55 is an expected record. She’s Jane Birken and Serge Gainsbourg’s daughter and singing circular accented English lyrics written Jarvis Cocker over Air’s music with Nigel Godrich’s production. Of course it will not be bad. But that was all that could be critically mustered, an acknowledgement of quality. I have to acquiesce to that, to some degree; 5:55 is not particularly monumental, but it isn’t trying to be. The songs gel into one fog of open and blurred tones. “The Songs That We Sing,” one of the album’s more forceful songs with its military stomp is even, at one point, reduced to the slow murmur of humming and tingling bells. “The songs that we sing/ do they mean anything/ to the people we’re singing them to?” she asks like a bored philosopher and then answers uncontently that “tonight they do.” This lackluster commitment and relief is completely tantalizing to me. Sometimes, I don’t want dazzle, just complete and utter competency. Why is this? Maybe there is too much saturation with desires and strives for newness and innovation. It’s been a year since I made a fanzine, mostly because I feel like four issues of the same thing is too much. I don’t put my own photo on here any longer because it’s been here enough. But am I wrong? Is a bit of complacent enjoyment of success, albeit hopefully with a bit of forward momentum, much of a mistake?

I saw Richard Prince’s exhibit at the Guggenheim last week and what I like most about his joke paintings was not only that he kept using jokes, but that he kept using the same jokes. It should have been ingratiating, but instead was comfortable. That expected punch line no longer stings, but just tickles. Thus with less cutting it lets the art soak better, the bite reduced for the sake of the whole. 5:55 is entirely that, a team of really-good-at-what-they-do-ers making one grand accomplishment tried and true-ily and carefully, all players knowing when to sit on their laurels because their laurels are made of gold and magic.