Imogen Heap
Sparks
RCA
6/10
Apparently the three-year creative journey that was the creation of Sparks began with striking a match. And not that it’s terribly surprising for this goddess of baroque visceral obscurantism, but Heap’s fourth album veritably smolders with mystical sexuality and philosophical inquisitiveness. Particularly, experiments in what has been described as “generative and reactive music” birthed the fascinatingly puzzling “Me the Machine,” which finds the songstress meditating on “A blip in the algorithm / A break in the clouds.” And with recording spanning the globe from London to the Himalayas, the sense of Sparks being an aesthetic and emotional travelogue of sorts is perhaps its most striking feature. Indeed, the music feverishly darts between Western and Eastern touchstones with an exuberance that is nothing shy of utterly enrapturing; it’s Imogen at her most shamanic and substantive. “You know where to find me,” she insists—just don’t be surprised if it’s like no place you ever imagined.
