Dog Day
Sarah Assbring grew up close to nature, listening to her fathers collection of rock and blues records in her familys home outside of the city of Gothenburg, Sweden. She sang in choirs, played the piano and made up her mind early on that music would always be a central point in her life.
But before she could follow through with her plans, she and music had a falling out. I lost the inspiration, Assbring says, and I lost the creativity. Assbring says that for two years, she could not write or listen to music. There was no real trigger for her departure from music and no traumatic event that explains it; but Assbring says that it left her in total existential turmoil. There was a trigger though for her return to the art. At the end of 2003, Assbring took a vacation to a Spanish island to clear her head. One day, she found herself sitting alone and disenchanted on a beach when a scraggly mutt approached her. This stray dog stopped and looked me straight in the eyes, she says. The chance encounter gave her something: not fleas, but an inspirational sign to give music another try.
The visit from the stray dog also gave Assbring, now 30, the name of her musical identity, El Perro del Mar, which translates to The Dog of the Sea. The name, Assbring says, became a constant reminder of that turning point, like a precious expression or an amulet that I kept close to myself. Assbring slowly began writing music again when she returned from her Spanish vacation, and she eventually released a slew of EPs that were compiled in 2005 and released as her first album, Look! Its El Perro del Mar! The compilation was later reworked and put out as a self-titled album in the United Kingdom and later in the United States.
Assbring has the floating, pristine voice of a blonde church angel and the porcelain face to match; but her music as El Perro Del Mar is somber enough to garner her comparisons to another solo singer named for a domesticated house pet: Cat Powers Chan Marshall. Her early releases reference 1960s girl-group pop, complete with shoo-bee-doos and backup singers. On her recently released second full-length album, From the Valley to the Stars, she eases up on those previous elements in favor of focusing on classic composer writing. Assbring had total control of the songwriting and instrumentation on this album, and the album shows her appreciation for broader orchestration. The songs do have a free and easy feeling to them, but the use of clear-cut, well-placed instrumental segments, like an oboe or string section, accomplishes Assbrings goal of making each song sound like a complete entity from start to finish.
May 7, Joes Pub, 425 Lafayette St. (betw. Astor Pl. & E. 4th St.), 212-967-7555; 9:30, $TBD (also May 8 at Bowery Ballroom).