Album Review: Ellipse by Imogen Heap

It took seven years for Imogen Heap to follow her debut album I Megaphone with her breakthrough Speak for Yourself (during which time Heap was in Frou Frou with Guy Sigsworth), so the four-year gap between it and its follow-up, Ellipse, feels relatively short. Speak for Yourself's stunning single "Hide and Seek" took on a life of its own, partly thanks to its use in a crucial scene in the teen drama The O.C., but mostly because it was so spare and bittersweet: Heap's heavily processed vocals became more affecting because of those effects. That sound was so distinctive, it would have been easy for Heap to fall into the trap of trying to recapture that magic.

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London songwriter Imogen Heap is better known for her skill in employing the internet to push her career than for her actual music. She's got hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers and MySpace friends (though not, inexplicably, the sales to match), but the only songs that might be familiar to non-fans are the 2007 Grammy-nominated Can't Take it In and Hide and Seek, which made it on to The OC. This beguiling third album deserves to be her breakthrough moment, though the absence of an obvious Hide and Seek-style focal point may hinder its chances.

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So-called “Download Diva” continues musical exploration of the waking dream.Suspend your disbelief for a moment and try to imagine the musical grayscale between Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, Peter Gabriel’s late Genesis/early-solo era, the entirety of The Cocteau Twins’ catalog and Beth Orton’s Trailer Park. This almost approaches the casserole of sound on British singer/songwriter Imogen Heap’s third solo release, Ellipse. surface texture—in a manner unheard since the salad days of Tori Amos.

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After many false starts and failed release dates, Imogen Heap’s third solo album, Ellipse, is finally here. This is Heap’s first album since 2005, and it is also her first full-length for White Rabbit, an imprint of BMG that gives her big-label promotion with small-label control. Ellipse has also arrived via a rather, well, elliptical path in which Heap adopted and abandoned other large-scale projects, such as scoring a Disney documentary about flamingoes.

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Grammy-nominated, big in America Heap documented the creation of her third album via 40 YouTube clips. Very modern, even if her pleasing sound never pushes real boundaries..

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