IMOGEN HEAP is in all likelihood the world’s most laptop-savvy musician. She plays Pop!Tech, faithfully documents her recording on YouTube, and gives her fans an almost unprecedented role in creating her music. Her breakthrough single, “Hide and Seek,” did completely without instrumentation: it enveloped us during a particularly emotional moment in The O.C. with a shapeless mass of Heap’s warm vocals chorded through vocoder. In a video segment for Good magazine, she recently described her work as “making funny noises and singing the occasional song.” So there’s little doubt that Heap is as obsessed with the packaging of sounds as she is with composing melodies, and that, if forced to name a primary instrument, Pro Tools would give her piano a run for its money.

But the key phrase in that paragraph was “a particularly emotional moment,” which is, in essence, what every Imogen Heap song aims to be. At her core, Heap is a standard pop writer—she pens literal lyrics about crushes and self-doubt, and usually fits them into predictably-ordered verses, choruses, and bridges. And she’s just the kind of person to do it: her airy voice is exquisitely enchanting, her bubbly, eccentric personality charming, and her songs heavy on intense dynamics. Since Zach Braff first made her electronic incarnation semi-famous in Garden State, the crush has been a bit too fluttery to necessitate much deep listening. But what we’re confronted with on Ellipse is the question of whether her MacBook-orchestrated dramas are, for all their fussy complexity, much more than exceptionally pleasant background music.

It may be her voice, which sounds like the feeling of settling down to sleep after just the right number of drinks, or it might be her overwhelming preference on this record for an overarching, lulling midtempo. The attraction of hushed slow-movers like “First Train Home” and “Wait it Out” is their impressionistic mood, and there’s no doubt they sound best late at night, in the dark, in moments of longing. But pick them apart and you find straight-laced, boxed-in melodies and everything else you expect: gentle tension, building crescendos, and bubbling drum tracks. On “Earth,” she sends vocal rounds ricocheting around the studio without much to back them up or a reason to keep listening after you’ve gotten the gist. None of these songs give the impression that Heap is out of ideas, but they hint that she’s bored, continuing to try to enliven a formula that ultimately limits her.

How devotedly she walks the narrow way is especially clear when she finally veers off of it, particularly on the excellent “Aha!” It’s easily the most energetic song on Ellipse, and earns that title with scarcely a single beat of percussion. Nervous, staccato-ed strings set the chorus’ pace, and Heap finally blasts out of her melodic cage, letting her voice rip up and down from sinister “la la las” to witchy howls. It’s chilling, invigorating, and keeps the whole affair to tight two and half minutes. “2-1” is a bit more conventional, but inhabits a similarly dark, engaging sonic world that hums and growls behind some refreshingly powerful singing.

We get that Heap owns pretty, as she illustrates with flair on heartbreakingly lovely piano-backed snippets like “Between Sheets” and the closing “Half Life.” But with talent so apparent, and technical wizardry so finely practiced, who doesn’t want to see her go for broke? And sooner rather than later, because you know, Grey’s Anatomy isn’t around anymore. I hear there are quite a few more of those Narnia movies on the way, but we all know Imogen Heap has more in her than exit music for films.