Gainsbourg performance focuses on new release

Even though Charlotte Gainsbourg made her recording debut 25 years ago, her show at the TLA on Friday was not only her first in Philly but her third ever. The acclaimed 38-year-old actress (Antichrist, I'm Not There) and daughter of iconic French provocateur Serge Gainsbourg and British singer/actress Jane Birkin projected a stylish cool. She was transfixing to watch, if in part out of curiosity to see if she would ever let down her guard.

Between her second album, 2006's understated 5:55, and her new IRM, Gainsbourg suffered a cerebral hemorrhage as a result of a water-skiing spill, and the new album reflects the dislocation and fear borne of many hours in MRI machines (IRM is the French acronym for MRI). It's a collaboration with Beck, who wrote almost all of the songs, and instead of the whispery and crepuscular 5:55, IRM clatters ominously and sometimes noisily. It's not music for a chanteuse, even when it ratchets down.

Fronting an excellent five-piece band, Gainsbourg was the calm, focused center of a percussive, psychedelic swirl. Although she bookended the hour-long set by pounding on a pair of floor toms to "IRM" and "Le Chat du Café des Artistes," she mostly stood impassively at the mike or perched nonchalantly on a stool. Like her father, Gainsbourg has perfected a sort of talk-singing that conveys a conspiratorial intimacy or a sexy resignation. She's cool, in all senses of the word, even when the music revved up into a garage psych/Krautrock hybrid for "The Operation" or struck a T. Rex groove for "Dandelion."

The seated crowd skewed older, and the applause upon recognition of her cover of her father's "Sorry Angel" suggested a Francophile contingent. Gainsbourg's 17-song set included almost all of IRM, a pair of 5:55 songs, and an excellent, understated version of Bob Dylan's "Just Like a Woman."

Gainsbourg's unbroken reserve may have been a result of shyness and stage fright but it didn't necessarily seem that way: She was a commanding, if remote, presence. Like a star.

Philly's Fantasy Square Garden seems to have a record collection that stops at 1968, full of the Mamas & the Papas, the Hollies, and Jefferson Airplane. Their enthusiastic set tread precariously between pastiche and homage to their source material.