LPA Album Club BETA

There are a few things that define Imogen Heap's work, things like her classical background, her mastery of a variety of instruments and digital technologies alike, her incredible vocal production abilities, and the ever-present theatrical flair in her performances and arrangements. On her 2005 debut solo effort Speak for Yourself, all of these things are in full display, in equal measure and without compromise. Lush strings and piano parts are contrasted with bursts of glitch meshed with resampled live drums. I think it speaks to Heap's skill as a writer and producer that, even when her parts and arrangements can be quite complex, the songs don't feel overwhelmingly dense and busy, and instead stay quite accessible.

This collision between hand-played live instrumentation and electronic elements is immediately apparent on the opener, "Headlock", featuring sounds like that catchy synth arpeggio, some sinister cello phrases, dreamy vibraphone, and digital bass, and liberal amounts of Heap's own wordless vocals, plus the drums that burst in for the choruses and bridges. But "Headlock" is positively restrained when you compare it to "Goodnight and Go", which I think shows Heap's particular take on mid-2000s pop music being taken up a notch. The star of the show here is the breathtaking vocal arrangement, and the instrumentation complements it with some striking accent moments that help to paint the scenes and the drama in the lyrics. The bridge in this song is probably one of the greatest pop song bridges I have ever heard in my life.

Even when Imogen goes as minimal as she can, she still finds a way to put a wild twist on it. Not even midway through the album is the big highlight "Hide and Seek", an acappella song which, thanks to The O.C. and that Jason Derulo song, has come to be the best-known song on the album. Using almost nothing except her lead vocal and a digital harmoniser duplicating it to make chords underneath, Heap still manages to create a vivid emotional tableau and hold the listener's attention with a beautiful and dynamic performance.

"Hide and Seek" isn't the only Speak for Yourself song that has had new life breathed into it like this: "Goodnight and Go" was re-imagined by Ariana Grande on her 2018 album Sweetener, "Headlock" was a piece of a TikTok trend earlier this year, "Just for Now" has been sampled in many songs over the past decade (most notably forming the basis of many Clams Casino beats in the early 2010s) - the list goes on. This is an album full of songs that you will still find to be inspiring music creators and listeners today.

The songs on Speak for Yourself that I return to most often nowadays are "Headlock", "Have You Got It in You?" and "Clear the Area" (the one outright trip-hop beat on the album) - evidently, I'm gravitating towards the slightly-darker moments. When I first got into the album back in 2010, though, I was obsessed with it for months, and I think every song spent some time as my top-favourite except for "Daylight Robbery", which I will say I never really liked. There are some sounds and choices throughout the album that show its age, particularly the drums for me, but I find those qualities kind of endearing. At the time when the album came out, digital production wasn't very new anymore, but web 2.0 wasn't a huge thing yet, and I hear that innocence and hope for the future in the music.

 

I'm not quite astute enough to truly nail down why the album feels so 90s-inspired except to say that I narrowed it down to mostly the drum programming. In the rhythms alone, there's traces of old-school dance-pop, breakbeats, IDM, trip-hop and things like that, which were flourishing in the UK throughout mid-to-late-90s, bleeding into the early 2000s