2502340728Tracklisting
1) Headlock
2) Goodnight and Go
3) Have You Got It In You?
4) Loose Ends
5) Hide and Seek
6)  Clear the Area
7) Daylight Robbery
8) The Walk
9) Just For Now
10) I Am In Love With You
11) Closing In
12) The Moment I Said It
13) Speeding Cars (Japanese Re-Release Bonus Track)
14) Can’t Take It In (Japanese Re-Release Bonus Track)

Speak for Yourself is the second album from British artist Imogen Heap, and the third she has taken part in including her time being half of the duo Frou Frou, which disbanded sometime between Details and Speak For Yourself. It had two singles preceding its release, Hide and Seek and Goodnight and Go, while Headlock also had a music video filmed for it. The bonus track Can’t Take It In was used in the movie The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, while The Moment I Said It was used in an episode of Criminal Minds called Seven Seconds. It was originally released on the 18th of July, 2005.

My, is this really Imogen? I thought I was listening to Frou Frou all over again. In all seriousness though, the album ditches Imgoen’s initial punk/grunge rock sensibility and takes on a much more synthesized, natural sound, similar to the approach that was taken with Details. As such, it really appeals to a much smaller audience, and old fans that started drifting away upon the release of Details could initially be scared off by how different this really is, but once you get past that and listen to the album as it is, there’s definitely a lot to love here. And if this is your first album, so much the better: No shocks for you!

Despite the new sound, the diversity of the tracks is still highly apparent. There’s a pop song in Goodnight and Go and Just For Now, a darker track in Daylight Robbery and The Walk, and even obscure, gentler songs such as I Am In Love With You and The Moment I Said It. The trip-hop, synth-pop elements are still here, and they’ve been put to good use. It’s nice to hear such a diversity of tracks, and there’s so much diversity here that you could pretty much say that it trumps Details in that respect, as Imogen uses a whole different array of sounds throughout the album.

The album is, for all intents and purposes, a love-it-or-hate-it affair. I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone who isn’t a rabid Imogen fan who likes every track on the album, and sometimes the hype of a song will actually kill the potential it initially had to make a huge impact on you. This album is full of this, too, as at least three songs have appeared on The O.C., and subsequently one of these songs started being used all over the place, leading to a bit of over-exposure, if anything.

And while the hype machine has even taken me down a few times before, I have to say: I’ve heard the hype, and honestly, Hide and Seek deserves it. I’m sure we’ve all heard of it by this stage: That dark, foreboding, melancholic a capella song that only features Imogen and the harmonizer. It may be simple, and it may be over-hyped, but the fact that the song is so unique, so open-ended meaning wise, and yet so emotional despite the amount of technological covering in it makes it a rather impressive feat of a song. As much as I love it, though, it honestly seems largely out of place. It may be a diverse album, but absolutely nothing but a Perfume album would be able to contain that song successfully.

And as a whole, it’s because of this fact that a few songs initially trump Hide and Seek. Songs like the painfully mood-stradling Headlock and the dark, powerful Daylight Robbery just end up showing a superior side in the context of the album, though they can’t really be called inferior: All of Imogen’s songs are full of meanings, it’s just that they take it on in a much more conventional manner, which will be easier to swallow for the more mainstream-loving listeners.

The album works extremely well as a whole: The digital yet natural sound of the album mixes the songs together in a very respectable manner, and this manages to connect each song with that one single thread, with the only slight hitch being the lack of a melodic structure in Hide and Seek. A few niggles between the radically different moods and pitches of certain songs could provide a slightly less favorable transition throughout the record, but it all depends on how much attention you pay to that when it comes to whether it ruins it for you or not.

Album Score
A-

Favorite Tracks
1) Headlock
2) Daylight Robbery
3) Just For Now
4) Hide and Seek
5) Goodnight and Go

In some ways, this album is much better than Details. In some ways, it’s much worse. The album has a much more consistent and cohesive sound to it, while at the same time it handles things in a manner that make me see it as slightly more off-putting than its predecessor. It’s in no way a bad album, and there wasn’t a single bad track to be seen here (Well… Maybe Clear The Area.), but I just can’t see it as being as easy to get into for fans or newcomers. Details provides a nice bit of leeway in that it isn’t as digital as this album, so maybe that would be a better place to start, but this is definitely still a highly recommended album.

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