One minute, she's auditioning for a spot in a Curve cover band, doing her best to convincingly sulk and pout. The next, she attempts to out-cloy every AOR merchant of schlock with a Lilith Fair ticket stub in their jewelry box. Throughout the rest of Speak For Yourself, Imogen Heap nervously flits between these two poles, envisioning a world where Sarah McLachlan, Shirley Manson, and Björk do each other's hair and sing into hairbrushes. The results of this musical terraforming are at once both gorgeous and bland.
It's not for want of trying, though. Heap actually mortgaged her London flat to finance the making of this record, and the go-for-broke attitude is evident. This record is produced within an inch of its life, sounds on top of sounds topped off with a gauzy candy-coated sheen that's, at times, too much to bear. Ornate baubles like "Clear the Area" and "The Walk" threaten to collapse under the weight of all their finery. Most of the tracks are a sticky-sweet conglomeration of piano and other sparking sounds-- synth air rushing in, Dopplered voices fading away. Sometimes these sounds are abetted by fuck-off guitars (like "Daylight Robbery") or big-beat drum machines (like "I Am In Love With You"). Invariably, most of the tracks find a samey safe spot between the unrepentant Nelly Furtado-esque chirping of "Goodnight and Go" and the maudlin yearning of "Just For Now".
And then there's Heap's voice, an ephemeral elastic thing that more often than not disappears into the music. It's hard to believe that someone executing these vocal gymnastics can also evaporate so easily. Sometimes, she gets lost within her own songs; sometimes, she gets lost within her own round-robin multi-tracking trickery. The pouting on "Daylight Robbery" is as loud as she gets, and even that's soft as silk. More often than not, the listener is caressed with whispers and sighs and innocuous vowels-as-words attached to lyrics that are often as airy as her vocals. There's also Heap's tendency to indiscriminately toss in those little yelp-sighs that some singers (hello, Ms. McLachlan) lean on until it turns from "charming affectation" to "offputting tic".
Having said that, there's no reason why this album can't be the subject of a torrid aural love affair. Her ostentatiousness is endearing, if you can swallow both the musical and vocal flourishes. And when Heap's personality shines through all the trappings and inadvertent emulations (somewhere before the chorus in "Goodbye and Go", for example), it's a welcome breath of fresh air. And it's not like the songs are bad. They're just too much, and pity the fool with no patience for pretty frou frou stuff listening to any of this. The black sheep of the bunch, "Hide and Seek"-- aka That Song From "The O.C."-- best exemplifies the strengths and weaknesses of this album. The track consists of nothing but a Vocoder and her voice singing stuff about crop circles and sewing machines. It's gorgeous, it's impressive, it's grandiose, and it's barely there at all-- just Heap's voice darting and divebombing, making itself scarce, disappearing into itself.
