Ambient can seem above reproach, too lofty and amorphous to criticize. Infuriatingly, this is kind of true: who, after all, is going to tell Stars of the Lid to quit making that track over and over again? At what point do those slow swoons stop working, especially when arranged with such devastating precision? To his credit, Eluvium’s Matthew Cooper writhes within the genre, crafting from ambient’s cloudy basics sturdy, tangible songs. He sets out not for mood music but starry-eyed, gut-wrenching beauty: angels crying, cities in fast motion, intergalactic travel.

On 2007’s Copia, this ambition found him at a point of mawkish severity. Unlike earlier work, Copia was neither epic nor beautiful, but melodramatic and frilly. With Similes, he has re-grounded himself using surprisingly un-ambient means: plaintive vocal turns, steady human percussion, traditional and discernible instrumentation. In other words: songs! But as songs they have the air of a master chef producing a sandwich, each related to their subject by basic ingredients and structure alone, and still resounding with the artistry of their creator. We barely notice what is occurring when Cooper begins to sing, so wholly does this record sound merely like Eluvium at its very best.

The songs–and, indeed, Cooper’s voice–never push their luck coming in at an Ian Curtis monotone, which complements the lush clockwork percussion of the opener or the slowburn balladry of “Making Up Minds.” We sigh deeply at these moments, relieved that Cooper has evaded self-parody. Elsewhere he plays with expectations, creating via piano (on “In Culmination”) the same gauzy aural washes that on Talk Amongst the Trees seemed extraterrestrially composed. Here we see the piano, we see the room. We see Cooper within it, at last, coming across now as wholly human and, if grounded as such, all the more impressive for this output. In a genre given to relativism, here an artist has made a clear-cut challenge to himself, and succeeded wildly.

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