Given her award-winning and hyper-passionate performance in last year’s Antichrist, I expected a little more feeling from Charlotte Gainsbourg on her latest record, IRM.  Then on second thought, I figured it makes perfect sense for an actress who just starred in a Lars Von Trier film to retreat into a womb-like world of whispered emotions and detached eroticism.

Of course, an album with such subdued vocals and modest pop melodies needs a good producer to keep the audience stimulated, and IRM is fortunate enough to feature some inspired work by the inimitable Beck.  Most of the time, he surrounds Ms. Gainsbourg with gentle acoustic guitars, simple piano chords and throbbing bass drums, creating the sensation of a lover absentmindedly caressing your skin as pent-up lust pulsates through her veins.  Sometimes he has fun inserting his uber-European muse into extremely American genres, like in the White Stripes-lite blues rocker “Trick Pony,” or the horse-walkin’ country of “Dandelion.”  On a few tracks he also seems to get a kick out of suffusing the atmosphere with haunted bordello orchestras, as if to remind us that the lovely lady singing was the very same child conceived by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin during the magical Melody Nelson sessions.

Most of IRM is pleasantly sensual, tailor-made for heavy petting on a quiet Sunday afternoon.  A couple of songs (the nasal “Greenwich Mean Time” and the lyrically clunky title track) are almost annoying enough to belong in iPod commercials, but they’re kind of redeemed by their playfully mechanical productions.  And though the record often drifts awfully close to aloofness, it does contain one must-own instant classic that justifies its existence: the bouncy, brassy “Heaven Can Wait,” where Beck drops in for a duet and helps lay down a tune worthy of The Kinks’ late-’60s golden age.  For those 2 minutes and 41 seconds, purgatory has rarely felt so alluring.