You can't blame Matthew Cooper for wanting to try something different. Since 2003, he's been plugging away at an ambient style that is emotionally broad but conceptually narrow. There's only so much you can do with a palette limited to light classical instrumentation and drifting electronics, and Cooper's done most of it. An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death was a collection of Erik Satie-inspired piano pieces. When I Live By the Garden and the Sea drenched similarly plaintive melodies in radiant streams of noise. Copia, his greatest and most fully realized album, was full of hulking themes for strings and winds, while Miniatures (released under his real name) was tiny and fluttering. Life Through Bombardment, the deluxe vinyl box-set collecting his entire oeuvre up to 2009, was more than a collector's item-- it seemed to put a completed body of work to rest.
Whatever his approach, Cooper always goes hard for the same matrix of emotions-- melancholy, wistfulness, yearning-- and those of us who love his music cherish this predictability. His sound has an emotional intensity that is almost unseemly, evocative of heartbreak. That hasn't changed on Similes, his first post-Bombardment album, although the intensity is muffled to make room for delicate new elements: soft, stitchy percussion and Cooper's own laconic vocals. In a distant way, these are pop songs: Verses and choruses revolve slowly through wafting electronic sheens that glint with naturalistic piano. But his voice is so subdued and intermittent that it doesn't scan as a lead. It's just one slowly beating, spreading element among others.
Cooper's singing is weary and muted, in the neighborhood of Ian Curtis or Matthew Dear. He murmurs, so you catch only snatches of what he's saying, which seems appropriate in Eluvium music, always peacefully fragmented. His voice sits still amid the ruffling synths and pin-drop drums of "The Motion Makes Me Last"; the piano keys do the real singing. Cooper's affecting vulnerability is really pronounced on "Weird Creatures", where he cautiously treads the chords like slippery stones over a river. He was wise to limit the vocals to a few tracks, as they're not dynamic enough to withstand a whole album. Much of Similes is more standard, wordless Eluvium fare: the rumbling piano-based "In Culmination", the slow-burning "Nightmare 5" and "Bending Dream", and most of all the long, flickering closer "Cease to Know".
Whether Similes will truly wind up being the start of a new career phase or a footnote for Eluvium remains to be seen-- Cooper sounds so tentative about his singing that it won't be shocking if he follows it with a more characteristic album of instrumentals. If he continues to strive for pop forms, he may have to figure out how to make his voice do more than color his arrangements in monotonous shades. If not, Similes will retain value as more than a curio for its sheer approachability and its unique take on Cooper's well-established style. It doesn't move mountains like his best work, but it satisfies.
