Soundtrack specialist: Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion The Witch & The Wardrobe, Just Like Heaven OST, Shrek 2, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. It seems Imogen Heap is hoping that the simple plan of being in a thousand different places at once, lurching unspectacularly from behind the curtains of film halls everywhere, being half-audible in a scene already stolen by a talking donkey, or crow-barred into a medley of songs only heard as the credits roll and the audience gathers pace towards the exit doors, will eventually provide a natural substitute for being popular. Ubiquity, however, does not naturally entail popularity. When the majority of artists are narrowing their field and working on being known for one big sonic event, Imogen, fashion props in hand, teeters around every box-office foyer, equating the success of being heard with the thrill of being listened to. And this is the album’s biggest problem: it sounds pleasant enough, and on occasions it might even pique your interest, but it’s ostensibly still background music; Imogen is still not being listened to. And given the sheer complexity of the design, and the sheer weight of the production, this is something of a contradiction.
Classically trained, literate, 6-feet tall and the product of a Quaker boarding school, Imogen is an intimidating proposition for any adult male. Couple this with the pushy lyrical thrust of the fidgety ‘Have You Got It In You?’ and the vocoder avant-garde of ‘Hide and Seek’ and you have something a little oppressive. The sound is too pristine, the lyrics too clever-clever and the whole tenor too frightfully android to approach with any significant degree of humanity. Whilst tracks like ‘Clear The Area’ and ‘Just For Now’ court with some success the sparkling loveliness of Elizabeth Fraser and the elfish fascination of Bjork the jarring beats, the pizzicato strings and the soft-focus electronica lodge the entire thing somewhere between Sliding Doors and Blade Runner; between a hardrive and a bagful of kittens.
The irony of schizophrenia is that you can have the time of your life on the one hand and the misfortune never to be able recall it on the other; ‘Speak For Yourself’ is a similar proposition. There are a dozen reasons to recommend it and a dozen reasons to forget it. It’s the heavenliest of voices, the sweetest of sounds and the cleverest of deliveries but with next to nothing interesting to say.