Eluvium’s Nightmare Ending came out on Temporary Residence on May 14, 2013: a double CD, fourteen tracks, nearly 84 minutes. It is Matthew Cooper’s seventh album as Eluvium, counting Static Nocturne, the single long noise piece he released late in 2010, and when it was announced in February the label billed it as the first proper Eluvium album since Similes, the 2010 record on which he had started to sing. The story begins earlier than that. Nightmare Ending was meant to follow Copia, from 2007.
Cooper started it as a way to loosen what the label calls his self-imposed ideals of perfection. As the pieces piled up, he sorted them into “dreams” and “imperfections”, a version of dream against reality. The trouble, he told PopMatters, was that he grew attached to the flawed ones, “realizing that the imperfect stuff was actually the true, perfect stuff.” It became a mental knot, so he shelved the project and made Similes instead. The liner notes date the composing, playing and recording to 2007–2012 at Watership Sounds in Portland, Oregon. Apart from two guests, Cooper plays everything: piano, keyboards, synthesizers, guitar, bass, strings, tape, samples and percussion.
The opener, “Don’t Get Any Closer”, is nine minutes long and was the first track released ahead of the album. Cooper said he pictured old jazzy records with string sections while working on it, and that pop melodies grew out of that. Critics heard a heavy, train-like pulse under “By the Rails”. “Envenom Mettle”, which closes the first disc, has Mark T. Smith of Explosions in the Sky on guitar, samples and noises; the two later formed Inventions, whose first album came out in 2014. Short piano pieces such as “Caroling” break up the long drones. Cooper talked to string players about adding cello or violin to the solo piano pieces and left them bare because they had a kind of innocence that way. At the piano, he named Chopin as his closest match and Bach second.
The closer, “Happiness”, runs past eight minutes and is the only sung track. Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo wrote the words and sings them, and his bandmate James McNew recorded the vocal. Critics heard it differently. Consequence of Sound found his singing timid, PopMatters thought it close to Cooper’s own on Similes, and Pitchfork thought that handing the vocal to Kaplan rescued the ambient pop that had tripped Cooper up on Similes. The cover art is by Jeannie Lynn Paske, whose work appears on many Eluvium records.
Most reviews were warm. Pitchfork gave it 7.8 and ranked it with Copia. Spin gave it 8 out of 10 and read it as a summary of his whole career, and Sputnikmusic called it his most evocative work yet. The reservations were about size. Consequence of Sound said it sometimes feels like two records spliced together, Spin admitted it was not his most cohesive, and Drowned in Sound found it sprawling and, for all the talk of flaws, very tightly controlled. PopMatters’ reviewer noted that his copy didn’t say which tracks were dreams and which were imperfections, and that he couldn’t tell.
That last point says the most. The dream-and-imperfection scheme mattered to Cooper and explains why the album took so long, but the critics who looked for it could not find it. What they did find was range: drones, rhythm, short piano pieces and a pop song sung by someone else. Cooper told PopMatters he gave every idea as much room as it needed, and two discs is the honest result of that decision, sprawl included. Consequence called it too big to work as an introduction, and that is fair. As a summary of what Eluvium had done by 2013, it is hard to beat, and it ends with eight minutes called “Happiness” in which Cooper hands the singing to someone else.
