Released: May 19, 2005
Links
Official music video: https://youtu.be/UYIAfiVGluk
Choral arrangement: https://youtu.be/WDghE74HRWs
TL;DR: Imogen Heap's not worried about your listening comfort and it still works to perfection.
And with my second review post, I'm already giving all of my (admittedly very few) readers a sense of the total musical whiplash that listening to one of my playlists is.
This song is, sadly, possibly the most memed piece of music not named "Never Gonna Give You Up", and that's only because the bridge and closing verse were used in the background of an infamous emotional TV scene (look into The OC for more on that.) Its value was even further diminished by Jason Derulo's sanitized, but admittedly catchy, sample version a few years later. And while it's a bit of an acquired taste, having let it sink in for a while, I don't think it's a stretch to say this was near the best musical accomplishments of the 2000s, and perhaps for a lot longer.
The production is by far the most jarring part, and I can't really talk about the vocals without discussing the song's sparse arrangement and vice versa. Imogen Heap has become relatively well known in Europe, and slightly less so abroad, for her frequent and innovative use of modern vocal effects. I would call the effect on this song a vocoder, but that's apparently not quite what it is based on limited research into this song. (For more, look up "Imogen Heap" and or "Hide and Seek" on YouTube.) And while I normally hate any obvious vocal effects, this is one of the rare cases where it actually feels appropriate and even quite good. There's a sense of discomfort with the contrast between the "harmony" vocals (entirely created with the magic of technology) at low and high volumes. Otherwise, this performance is entirely a capella as far as I can tell. A more knowledgeable musical mind could probably say whether it uses "dissonance chords" and other similar techniques to create that discomfort, but in any case it sets a spacious, sparse, lost, and sad mood. Given the way the song is written, this is absolutely brilliant. It's a risky but fresh take on modern music production.
Speaking of the lyrics, they're a bit abstract, but it doesn't take any research to hear the subtle echoes of pain and bitter sarcasm here. Most notably, you can almost hear the scoff in Heap's voice at "of course it is" on the well-known but brilliant bridge. While I wouldn't call this song hopeless or despairing, it's clearly not going to be a happy experience for any listener. However, the brilliance of the writing ("crop circles in the carpet" is one of the subtlest yet cleverest references to reminders that someone is gone, i.e. missing furniture, that I've ever heard; sadly I had to read online to figure out what it meant) means that you can deeply feel this song even if you can't directly relate to the narrator's painful experience.
I'm prone to hyperbole, but if I ever do a full 500 best songs of all time list similar to Rolling Stone, this song would be on there somewhere. What a masterpiece.
Score: 10/10 (best of a decade and near all-time great)