El Perro Del Mar
Millennium Stage, Washington DC, March 29, 2024
In March 2007 I had one of the most viscerally uncomfortable musical experiences of my concertgoing life, at Amoeba Records in San Francisco. It was an in-store gig with
El Perro Del Mar, an emerging Swedish singer-songwriter of whom I was only vaguely aware, and my discomfort was from the fact that I stood maybe three feet from her while she sang intense, vaguely goofy songs and I had to try to watch respectfully and not giggle when she lapsed into what appeared to be a kind of self-parody. (One nice thing about writing up all my shows is that I have a detailed record of this experience.)
El Perro Del Mar — the stage name of Sarah Assbring — has a long career in an evolving space of artsy, conceptually sophisticated experimental pop with influences from torch songs and cabaret, gothic atmospherics, chilly Scandinavian synthpop, and the darker side of 1960s girl-group pop with David Lynchian influences that has been inspiring Lana Del Rey.
Pitchfork used to review El Perro Del Mar respectfully for each record, and in 2018, she had a short record called
We Are History which was a free download, but I hadn’t heard much about her in a few years, certainly not since the pandemic.
But I’m not going to pass up the chance to seen an artist I’ve known and followed at the Kennedy Center, and my experience this past week at the Millennium Stage in Washington couldn’t’ve been more different than the 2007 experience at Amoeba. I did walk within a few feet of her, but she stood above us on the handsome stage flanked by two keyboardists. Assbring was wearing an unseasonable trench coat, holding a bouquet of red roses, which served as her props during a brief 50-minute show spotlighting a recent album called
Big Anonymous, of which I’d heard nothing. (Apparently, it’s Assbring’s first full-length as El Perro Del Mar in eight years, although she had other projects in the interval, including collaborations with choreographers and some releases under her given name.)
From her austere presentation and stage presence, Assbring was quite the contrast with the last singer-songwriter I had seen on the Millennium Stage, Haley Heynderickx. At times during the show I was thinking of Bat for Lashes, the conceptual alter-ego of Britain’s Natasha Khan, with whom Assbring has some vocal similarities, but Khan has more of a fondness for the traditional catharsis and resolution of sweeping pop choruses, whereas Assbring keeps her audience uncomfortable (and not just when they’re standing next to her). At times, it was pure synthpop with moody influences; Assbring doesn’t deny her fondness for some of the pioneers of that space (check out her
cover of Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream”), and there were even some out-of-place EDM beats that ricocheted around the genteel surroundings of the Kennedy Center. But mostly it was coldly aesthetic torch songs and cabaret over keyboards rich with reverb and echo, like the featured track “Suburban Dream,” which sounds like something you would have heard in the soundtrack to Twin Peaks if the Roadhouse was an elegantly debauched 21st century urban club, instead of a 1980s rural highway tavern.
You can watch all of El Perro Del Mar’s March 29, 2024 performance on the Kennedy Center website.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/31/2024 09:48PM by zwirnm.
