Bassist Mike Watt — a third of Eighties hardcore-punk band the Minutemen, now in the Stooges — calls this album an "opera." He's right. The 30 tracks are blitzkrieg arias, sung and barked as if Watt is playing the shards of his heart and mind after a lifetime in the van ("Finger-Pointing- Man," "Hell-Building- Man"). His new trio reinvigorates the old one's rapid minimalism with the glass-bone guitar and rhythmic vertigo of Captain Beefheart's classic Magic Band. Loss is a constant presence on Hyphenated- Man, along with the memories left behind. "Forget? Fuck that, man," Watt snaps in "Confused-Parts-Man." "Learn from it."

Listen to "Arrow Pierced Egg Man":

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“IRM”

Fashioned to mimic the sound of a magnetic resonance imaging or MRI, "IRM" (the French designation for the brain scan) grew out of Gainsbourg’s love of the sound of the clickety-clack of medical machinery. The IRM album project also marked the fulfillment of two goals for the singer: to document a traumatic experience, and to record an album with Beck. Though her co-creator and producer didn’t necessarily know the details of her water-skiing accident and resulting cerebral hemorrhage (which lead to the IRM of the song's title), he somehow knew how to handle the material. "Beck had a way of guessing what I was thinking and feeling without me telling him," said Gainsbourg. "We never discussed these things explicitly."