El Perro Del Mar - Love is Not Pop

	December 02, 2009

 

Swedish love connoisseur comes knocking on our doors with Love is Not Pop

El Perro Del Mar is incredibly soothing, filtered smoke, billowing into homes where car commercials run on loops. Sarah Assbring is the voice and heart of the Perro, with an angelic voice that hovers close to the city sky. Her native Sweden has been blasting Love is Not Pop since April this year and here we are in the cold reaches of winter, just now receiving this melancholy/joyous pop, with its synth lines knocking on our cold hovel doors. She tells us if she could crash for a while. She says, “Baby open up the door,” on Let Me In a track where she coos, “don’t make me out to beg for more.” And oddly enough backup singers accompany her at the threshold. It’s nothing too familiar, too new, but somewhere that pop hasn’t been in a while with very deliberate sounded out lyrics. OK, go ahead and bring up Lykke Li, that’s there for the taking, it’s a simple enough comparison.

But Perro announces her entrance into the room, pouting about her guitars and bass lines not having enough Island flavor. On Change Of Heart she’s holding back something, it’s smoldering in her and she goes on chasing away melancholy with a choir that invokes more feelings of rejection.

L is for Love is her grand entrance to the ball, but there’s nobody there. Her voice echoes and the drums rumble the windows. She proclaims L is for Love in the chorus, sand and water washing over the drums. Perro has a ghostly presence now, she’s evaporated, the claim that Love is a letter is a joke, it shouldn’t be explained this way and so it devolves into washed out voice coalescing into L is for…Love, all spelled out like it doesn’t matter anymore. The inevitable conclusion to a movie, roll credits, don’t tell us how it end, but let everyone fill in the blanks themselves. Heavenly Arms is her love note to Lou Reed’s glam days, but she pulls everything down to the ground and puts a finger to her mouth and goes, “ssshhh” with ache in her voice until she reaches the inevitable Sylvia chorus.

Yes, “this isn’t over until I say when” are the last words on the album. It’s a count down and comes off as showy, but also endearing. Like letting someone cry on your shoulder until they’re done, but once they feel well again they have to get out, because the feeling is not mutual.

by Nathan Solis