The late Serge Gainsbourg certainly had some unique ways of displaying affection. Nonpareil session musicians Sly and Robbie still talk fondly of working on his reggae album Aux Armes et Cætera, which seems sporting, given that Gainsbourg fondly nicknamed his Jamaican backing band "my chimpanzees". He expressed his love for his family by trying to turn them into celebrities, but Gainsbourg had a way of making people famous that leaves you wondering if dreary anonymity isn't such a bad idea after all. He wrote a film for his then wife Jane Birkin: a nice idea, save for the fact that its plot called upon Birkin to be repeatedly sodomised by a gay truck driver. His teenage daughter Charlotte got a specially written film too, co-starring Gainsbourg himself - the plot of that one required her to be undressed by, and then go to bed with, her father. More famously, she was gifted a No 1 single at age 13, also co-starring dad, called Lemon Incest.
You can't really blame Gainsbourg Jr for giving recording studios a wide berth over the past 20 years. Even if she wasn't permanently traumatised by her father's scandal-mongering, there's his inescapable musical shadow. His influence means 5:55 doesn't go short of blue-chip collaborators, most of them from this side of the Channel: alongside Gainsbourg-fixated Gallic electronic duo Air and Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, there's Jarvis Cocker, the Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon, and Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich. It seems unlikely they got involved because they were impressed by her backing vocals on Badly Drawn Boy's album Have You Fed the Fish?, but you can understand les rosbifs' eagerness to pay their respects to dad.
For English speakers, it's hard to find a way into Serge, simply because Anglo-American music has never produced anyone remotely like him. If you do lose yourself in his world of divine melodies, perplexing musical shifts and reckless provocations, however, it's equally hard to find a way out: his oeuvre tends to generate not fans but evangelists, who can't understand why he isn't held in the same regard as Dylan or Bowie. But the desire to proselytise does not always lead to great music. 5:55 arrives just after tribute album Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited, a disaster of a magnitude unseen in France since the Seventh Panzer Division turned up. It reached some kind of nadir with Cat Power and supermodel Karen Elson's Je T'Aime ... Moi Non Plus, a legendary erotic duet that could have sounded less erotic only if sung by Chas and Dave.
After that, things could only get better, and so it proves. Nevertheless, 5:55 audibly springs from the same reverential impulse. There are tracks here that are not a direct homage to Gainsbourg Sr - the hypnotic guitars and woozy synthesizers of The Operation and the limpid ballad Beauty Mark among them - but his ghost is never far away. There's a distinctive, familiar smell of Gitanes and whisky about proceedings. The languidly funky drums and serpentine basslines, the orchestrations that swell from discrete shimmer to dramatic swoon, the rolling piano figures, the smuttily punning title of Nocturnal Intermission - all of them evoke Gainsbourg's late 1960s/early 1970s purple patch. Charlotte's vocals, meanwhile, manage to recall both her parents: the jolly-hockey-sticks enunciation and passing acquaintance with pitch sounds like her mother, the breathiness and semi-spoken delivery her father.
What stops 5:55 being a well-meaning pastiche, what makes the album touching rather ghoulish, is the sheer quality of the songwriting. Charlotte Gainsbourg is, it seems, a difficult customer in front of the microphone - she apparently overcame her shyness by singing while hidden under a sheet - but her reticence seems to have forced everyone else involved to the top of their game. Exquisite melodies and heart-stopping choruses abound: there's a particularly thrilling example of the latter on the breathless Everything I Cannot See. As lyricists, Cocker and Hannon are on rare form as anyone who's heard the former's remarkable download single Running the World and A Lady of a Certain Age, the tear-jerking centrepiece of the recent Divine Comedy album, will attest. Accordingly, the best lyrics here are fascinating. The Operation pitches its medical metaphor just right: "Our love goes under the knife/ The heart was rejected by the host." AF607105 examines the ineffable melancholy of air travel, hardly a topic regularly touched on in rock.
It's a genuinely delightful album, but also a puzzling one. Given her discomfort in the studio and reticence regarding her father - she refuses to discuss him in public "for my own sake" - you have to wonder why on earth Charlotte Gainsbourg made the album. An acclaimed and successful actress, she hardly needs a new career. There is no talk of a follow-up. The reason for 5:55's existence remains a mystery, but it's hard not to feel glad it exists.