Heap's electro-pop is one of a kind
Armed with musical intelligence and plenty of gadgets, singer bucks conventions
by Dave Tianen, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Published: December 17, 2006
Perhaps the most intriguing of the major Grammy categories is the Best New Artist bauble.
What's interesting about that is the potluck-at-the-record-store nature of the competition. For instance, this year's contenders have "American Idol" chart-topping, cover girl and country debutante Carrie Underwood up against - among others - Euro-pop eccentric Imogen Heap.
Heap was at the Rave Saturday night, and she appears to be a truly gifted and endearingly genuine odd duck. The best comparisons are to Kate Bush, but there are touches of Björk and Tori Amos in there as well, although without the former's ego or the latter's streak of anger. Heap is a London-based, classically trained pianist-turned-studio electronics whiz. She is by all appearances arty without artifice and gifted without gloom.
She came on stage Saturday in a cotton-candy pink dress that looked like something in which she could have fronted a 1940s polka band. Her hair was in an upswept Bride of Frankenstein coif with a matching pink skunk stripe down the middle. The stage and her transparent piano were ribboned with Christmas tree lights, and there were six circular video screens on the back wall. She opened with her "I Am In Love With You," a new song from her second album Speak For Yourself, and a promising mix of lust, infatuation and emotional ambiguity.
She then introduced all her gadgets. Heap is a studio whiz with an arresting arsenal of audio toys. There were gizmos to electronically distort her voice, loop her singing and playing, impersonate a toy piano, and, of course, that glass slipper of a piano. She also brought on four actual musicians, although even there the personnel was hardly conventional by rock band standards. One guy was a human beat box, and another doubled on the upright bass and French horn. And there was a percussionist who also took a turn at the xylophone.
All those studio gadgets suggest an audio playground, and there is certainly an element of playfulness in Heap's music, but buttressing all of it is a musical intelligence that is clearly multidimensional. Some of the songs seem designed as mainly aural soundscapes where she uses her high, clear voice mainly to add atmospherics. "Beauty in the Breakdown," a song from her side group project Frou Frou, is like that with a lovely cooing melody.
On the song "Just For Now," she showed just how artfully she can weld all those toys. Piece by piece, she looped her own voice and hand claps to create a full, rich mosaic of sound. When the mood suits her, she can write a simple, linear pop tune with sometimes striking imagery. For instance, "Hide and Seek" describes dust forming "crop circles in the carpet."
Two of Heap's band members, Levi Weaver and Kid Beyond, opened for her. Like their boss, they both used looping to turn solo performances into multilayered affairs. In introducing Kid Beyond, Heap got some laughs when she noted, "It's amazing what one man can do with his mouth."
She's right. The Kid takes the core rhythmic elements of the human beat box and adds layers of singing and melody until what seems merely like a stunning stunt becomes something quite artful.