Keep it close like a memory / notes by Oliver Craske
‘It’s not strange for me to write about these things. It’s always when I am really at the edge of feeling that I need to write.’
El Perro del Mar has always made music with passion and commitment, with an open heart and mind, and fierce independence. Now, with Big Anonymous, she goes places where few choose to venture in public: dialogues with the dead, musings on her own mortality, reflections on the inner darkness that she inherited. It’s gothic, crepuscular, moody – and magnificent. And in the end you might just find it uplifting. She does.
El Perro del Mar is the alter ego of Sarah Assbring, the Swedish singer, multi-instrumentalist and composer who has been one of the most consistently intriguing pop artists of the 21st century. Named after a stray dog she once encountered on a Spanish beach, who lifted her spirits at a fragile moment, El Perro del Mar put out her first releases in 2005. Soon she was winning awards, being namechecked by David Bowie and touring internationally with the likes of Lykke Li, José González, Taken by Trees and TV on the Radio. But she was never part of a pack.
Big Anonymous is El Perro’s eighth album, and it’s a tough job to sum up the musical path taken by this relentless shape-shifter in the years between then and now. It’s encompassed doo-wop redux, mystic ballads, electronic dance, loner’s laments, ecstatic love songs, film soundtracks, dance scores, global pop, political pop, existential pop and more. Every time you think you’ve put her in a box, this Schrödinger’s Dog eludes you. But it’s fair to say that introspection has been a consistent theme in her music, and that it’s always been balanced out by the resurrecting power of love and hope.
This time she has really embraced the existential. Having lost too many family members over the years, Sarah came to realise that she was haunted by grief that wouldn’t go away. She felt guilt at being alive when others weren’t, and was dogged by a sense of her own mortality. And she wanted to move on from these preoccupying thoughts.
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