eluvium’s similes: thoughts after one listen
Eluvium’s fifth full-length LP is pretty. That may appear to be a compliment at first, but my impression of the album — released two days ago — after one listen is one of slight disappointment. Similes hit stores with its share of hype, mostly touted as a successful transition of sorts for Matthew Cooper, who to this point had kept his voice away from the microphone and written multi-layered songs without a formal structure, to great effect. This time, Cooper retains the familiar style for only a few of the record’s eight songs, introducing vocals and somewhat of a pop song structure to more than half of the pieces. The new style sounds nice — and pretty — but it seems clear that to a degree, Cooper has abandoned his greatest strength with this album.
This isn’t to say that experimenting with a new musical style after a number of years isn’t critical to a musician’s remaining relevant and inspired — look no further than the Beatles — but making “songs” instead of improvised “pieces” is usually the territory of musicians outside the drone/ambient/noise bubble. This has nothing to do with track length — possibly my favorite album Cooper has put out is his Miniatures LP, a little-known vinyl-only release under his given name made up of nine relatively short, simple tracks. On that album — and Copia, another favorite — Cooper devotes all of his attention to the “sound” of the tracks — what’s heard two rooms away, muffled by a few walls and background clatter. With Similes, it seems that Cooper’s new style — while a noble risk — is compromising the freedom he took advantage of so beautifully on past albums. “Calm of the Cast-Light Cloud,” a thick and unapologetic five-minute drone from his Talk Amongst The Trees LP is gorgeous, and it would’ve been out of place on Similes, interrupting the clinical process set about by the more measured, structured tracks.
Still, Similes does feature a handful of nods to Cooper’s best work, like “Nightmare 5,” a haunting instrumental piece that sounds much like its title, and “Bending Dream,” which is what the underappreciated music of Julianna Barwick would resemble if translated to the score for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Closer “Cease to Know” makes great use of cyclical electronic howls for more than eight minutes, but only after Cooper’s voice makes a hesitant and brief appearance.
When any vocals — especially Cooper’s, which deviate little within and between these songs — are set to this type of music, it changes the complexion of an album entirely. Whereas an instrumental piece lets the listener find his own world to set the music to, lyric-based music is more grounded and mundane — which is fine. It just may not be an ideal match for music of this style.
