Monday, Jan 1st, 2007. The traditional yearly night of debauchery, this time spent in a small provincial city in East Anglia, had drawn to a close a couple of hours before and the slow creep into the post-party decline was well underway. Get out of the big city to see in the New Year and return the very next day; that had been the plan. With no sleep, we arrived at the train station at 7am for the two-hour-plus journey home.

An empty carriage presented itself to the five of us. We sat in a row, each leaning against our windows, and attempted to make ourselves as comfortable as humanly possible in the cramped conditions well known to those who travel regularly on the British railway system. It was obvious that genuine sleep was going to be nigh on impossible. The cocktail of chemicals coursing through my body was enough to make sure of that, even if it were not for the fact that I was crushed into sitting with my knees somewhere around my ears. Two hours of this would pass as cruel and unusual punishment in some countries. Music, I realized, was my only recourse to sanity on this journey.

I started up my mp3 player and cycled through the artists. Nothing appealed. Why had I seen fit, I wondered, to fill my mp3 player's tiny hard-drive with almost incessantly upbeat, noisy music? Had I not planned for this trip? Despairingly I cycled through once more, looking for something I may have missed. Eluvium. The word caught my eye. I remembered that I had loaded this on to the player just the day before ready to do my journalistic duty. Surely what I would find here would soothe the dull throbbing in my temple. I hit the play button and within seconds the sound of mournful horns and organ slowly swelled in my ears, and as it made its way through my body I thanked whatever serendipitous coincidence had lead to this perfect syncopation of mood and music.

The train's journey took us through rolling fields and leaf-barren forests, through sleeping towns and derelict, broken down urban scenes. It took us from perfect darkness, right through the sunrise into a gloriously bright and crisp winter's day by the time we had arrived at our destination. Copia followed every bend in the track, every change in scene. When I closed my eyes the slowly rising sun made intricate whirling, dancing patterns on the inside of my eyelids, and so the sound of a lone piano or the heart-sick call of a violin would soundtrack these strange, fleeting images. I listened to Copia twice in a row on that journey, and every swell of warm, Eno-esque synth; every shimmer of reverb; every slow, melancholic call of brass; all seemed calculated to connect precisely with how I was feeling.

Copia is a lovely piece of work, comfortably sitting between minimal classical music (particularly on the piano-led tracks) and the ambient sheen of Brian Eno, William Basinski and the like. For this album, Matthew Cooper left behind almost all traditional rock instrumentation, including the shimmering washes of guitar that have been a mainstay of much of his previous work, and focused instead on strings, brass, synth and piano; and Copia is all the better for it. The mood is sad and reflective, yet traces of naivety and a hopeful yearning shine through, never allowing the music to become morose or depressing. This is an album for Sunday mornings; for when the light streams through the trees but carries with it no warmth; for those late-night moments of self-doubt and reproach; and most of all, for making your way home, just as the sun is rising.

-Kris Ilic