Imogen Heap, Speak For Yourself

I’ve fallen in love with a song. Hopelessly, insanely, head-over-heels in love with it, so much so that it’s a little freaky. Not that it’s anything intimate, mind you — my wife’s got nothing to worry about — but more that this one particular song is just so damn cool that I want to keep hearing it over and over and over again, and on top of that, I want everybody else to hear it over and over again, too. It’s almost like back in middle school, y’know, when you made friends with somebody who turned out to be really cool, or funny, or interesting, and you liked ’em so much that you wanted all your other friends to know them, too? It’s just like this massive, overwhelming admiration. It’s the kind of song around which mixtapes are created.

At any rate, that’s how I feel about Brit songstress Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek,” off of her recent step back into the solo spotlight (after a few years as half of Frou Frou), Speak For Yourself. This one song is why I bought the album — and I’ll get to that in a minute — and I still think it’s absolutely worth it, just so I can slap it in the car CD player any time I want. “Hide and Seek” is a gorgeous, heart-swelling gem of a track, the kind that makes you feel that little catch in your throat at certain specific moments. It practically glistens with a futuristic-sounding, almost metallic sheen, but still burns warm and bright in the best way, the vulnerable humanity shining through the oddly vocoder-esque vocals. (Note, by the way, that this song may be the only existing example of the right way to use that goddamn annoying electro-vocal trick popularized by Cher, Madonna, and a host of even more irritating pop stars.)

Thankfully, Ms. Heap’s vocals aren’t obscured by the studio trickery, but instead catapult off of it to shine their brightest; there’s something utterly magical about the way, when she hits the highest notes in the song, you can’t tell where she leaves off and the computer begins. At the low end, too, her voice hums and vibrates like it itself is an instrument, which makes sense when you realize that there really aren’t any “real” instruments on the track — it’s just her voice and the electronics, and yet it feels full and vibrant. There are elements of Lisa Gerrard here, but the closest touchstone I can come up with, really, is Enya; the vocals on her vastly underappreciated, self-titled debut, often accompanied only by synths or not at all, came near to the alien beauty of this one song.

Not that the lyrics don’t matter, of course. After the first few listens, I had in mind some kind of hypnotic, foreboding-yet-thrilling tale of alien invasion, but at this point I’m going to chalk that imagery up to the atmospherics of the track, because the lyrics are a lot more down to earth. At the heart of it, “Hide and Seek” seems to be a song about a relationship gone wrong, with Heap/the narrator confused, bewildered, angry, and viciously bitter all at once. The sweet shimmeriness of the music belies the venom of the words, which only really pierce through near the end, when Heap offers a series of damning rhetorical questions: “Mm what d’ya say? / O that you only meant well / Well of course you did / Mm that it’s all for the best / Of course it is / Mm that it’s just what we need / And you decided this?” Music and words together, the song sounds, at least to this reviewer, like a document of that exact moment when a relationship comes crashing down and leaves the people involved suddenly lost and confused, striking out at one another because they don’t understand what just happened. Time practically stops as they stumble to find words to fill the gap that suddenly looming between them.

Now, this review’s been a little unfair so far, I’ll admit. I’m not reviewing a single, here, but an album, and for me to ramble on at length about one track wedged in the middle certainly makes the other 11 tracks seem pretty paltry by comparison. And they shouldn’t, because as a whole Speak For Yourself is a stellar disc. In fact, the disparate elements of “Hide and Seek” are everywhere on here in various measure: the warbling, high-and-low vocals; the electronic backing tracks; and the lyrical focus on relationships, whether they’re beginning, ending, or somewhere in-between. Beyond “Hide and Seek,” highlights include “Goodnight and Go,” a sweet, poignant bit of yearning for a relationship that really shouldn’t happen but would be really great if it did; “Clear The Area,” a head-bobbing electro-pop track that likens the state of a depressed would-be lover to a crime scene; and “Closing In,” a claustrophobic, Massive Attack-esque roar of a song with nice washes of distant electric guitar and Blade Runner-like beeps and bloops.

Oddly, while Heap herself frequently gets compared (and not unrightfully so) to alternadivas like P.J. Harvey, Björk, Annie Lennox, and Kate Bush — and I do hear a lot of the latter of the four, in particular, in Heap’s vocal style, although it’s nowhere near as pixie-like — the person who comes to mind most often as Speak spins is a guy, veteran pop experimentalist Peter Gabriel. There are several moments here when I could swear Ms. Heap’s about to break into an (undoubtedly gorgeous) cover of “Red Rain,” or maybe swoon off into the elegaic “I Grieve,” off Up (Gabriel’s most recent full-length). I should note that I mean this as a compliment, by the way; to my mind, there are few figures as pivotal as Gabriel in the realm of pop music, particularly when it comes to blending electronics and “traditional” pop stylings. That’s probably where the resemblance is strongest, as both performers apparently have no fear of freely using computers to enhance their work. Beyond that, both have unique but beautifully expressive voices, the kind that may not be destined for singing arias (although Heap’s background is reportedly in classical music, if not opera) but are powerful on their own terms. If you don’t buy the comparison, try listening to the bumping, almost funky opening track “Headlock” alongside Gabriel’s Us — the music Gabriel and Heap make may be far from identical, but the general feel of it sure seems close.

There’s other stuff, naturally, like the slinky robofunk of “Loose Ends,” which also serves as a foil to the confusion and bitterness of “Hide and Seek” by way of being totally blasé about the collapse of an affair, “The Walk,” which comes off like “Missing”-era Everything But The Girl with its dance-y, speedy momentum, and “Just For Now,” a quirky, believable picture of familial strife at the holidays (I particularly enjoy it when Heap declares “Whoever put on this music / Had better quick sharp remove it” and then demands another drink from a disapproving parent).

And then there’s “The Moment I Said It,” a faltering, frightened-sounding track which closes out the album with a stark testament to the reality that sometimes all it takes is one wrong, angry word, one thoughtless sentence to tear the heart out of even the most passionate of relationships. Like the flipside of “Hide and Seek,” “The Moment I Said It” realizes immediately that things have suddenly spiraled out of control and frantically tries to reverse course. Taken as a chronicle of the wonderful possibilities and tragic dangers of relationships, Speak For Yourself is utterly real and authentic. I fell in love with one song, it’s true, but I’ll definitely be back to visit with the others.