Death, taxes, and life's other inevitability: break-up records. Sad-eyed Swede Sarah Assbring already has one under her belt, if you count 2005 Scandinavian release Look! It's El Perro Del Mar! (later refashioned with a slightly different tracklisting in the UK and North America as the self-titled El Perro Del Mar). But that's the thing about break-ups and, by extension, break-up records: At the time each feels like a cataclysm to end all cataclysms, the definitive statement on cessation. Yet in light of the next one-- and, God help us, chances are there will be a next one-- all the ones before can seem quaint, trite, overblown, and anything but definitive. So it makes sense that Assbring should craft another ode to getting over it, just as it makes a certain sad kind of sense that the gal who sang of being sad all day long (and thinking about being sad all night long) and suggested loneliness can be pretty would again find herself in a position to make such a record. Refreshingly, Love Is Not Pop does indeed make what came before it seem quaint, representing a significant maturation for El Perro Del Mar both in sonics and sentiments. If Look!/ El Perro Del Mar was Assbring rebounding from a failed high school romance to the tune of a candy bender and the familiar, comforting sounds of 1960s pop music, Love documents a more complicated, post-collegiate parting of ways against the more sophisticated sounds of late nights and dancefloors, courtesy of co-producer (and Studio half) Rasmus Hägg.
For one thing, she initiates this one. "I've got something to tell you," Assbring begins over gentle acoustic strums and rays of synth sunshine on Love opener "Gotta Get Smart". "Don't wanna make you sad." Of course what she has to say will do just that, but like many an El Perro Del Mar song, this one adorns its lyrical miseries in only the most uplifting of arrangements. When much of the mix drops out to let Assbring deliver the kicker-- "It hurts now but deep down inside/ We both know it's better to part than live in a lie"-- she sounds like the patron saint of mercy, and when a chorus of multi-tracked vocals arrives to invite us to "Go on, go on, go on," it's as if they're leading us to the promised land. Getting dumped never sounded better. From there it's on to piano-and-groove album highlight "Change of Heart" and the dubbed-out midnight excursion "L Is for Love", its echoes suggesting the infinity of a night spent teasing apart those great questions of life and love in search of an elemental clarity. "Love isn't anything," the chorus would seem to mock here. Least of all pop?
Yet El Perro's brand of pop is certainly easy to love, and a cozy sort of organic warmth-- characterized by thick, resonant drums and keys, and treated guitars that seem to lurch and lumber with the slightly irregular rhythms of real life-- pervades the new record. You're just as likely to swing your hips here as to curl up with the headphones on and rock yourself to sleep. Indeed, some tracks encourage both: just as "Heavenly Arms" threatens to carry the listener off to Nod, the beat gets reborn in double time, complete with handclaps that make for the most welcome alarm call ever. "It Is Something (To Have Wept)", meanwhile, hearkens directly back to the organ-saturated devotional hymns of El Perro's previous record, From the Valley to the Stars-- that is, until Assbring and Hägg blast the chapel straight into the stratosphere with a little bit of rhythm and a lot of production pyrotechnics. They really could have ended the record right there, but instead we get an epilogue of sorts, "A Better Love", wherein Assbring cuts to the very heart of the other thing about breakups: namely that the loves that come in between them (how's that for glass-half-empty thinking?) only tend to get, yes, better and better. "You deserve a better love than me," is Assbring's ultimate admission, and with that the break-up cycle-- as viewed from the unique point of view of the enacting party-- is complete. Whatever love is or isn't, who needs it when you've got records like this one?
