KoKoro, the latest album by El Perro Del Mar, takes its title from the Japanese word meaning heart or feeling, and from there you get a hint of what’s to come on: new musical terrain informed by an exotic “Far East” sensibility, couched in familiar El Perro Del Mar territory of melancholy and vulnerability. Almost 12 years into her career as El Perro Del Mar, founder Sarah Assbring’s appetite for reinvention remains strong. On KoKoro, the Swedish singer’s fifth album, her global wanderings bring her to unfamiliar places with inspiring albeit uneven results that showcase an artist who could easily make a turn for pop stardom.
Assbring has said that she’d been listening heavily to Japanese, Chinese, and Cambodian ’60s pop prior to the making of the album, but the influences of these sources on KoKoro are so overt and jumbled with modern pop and world music sensibilities, it comes off as a hodgepodge of cultural tourism. Throughout the album, Assbring utilizes classical Asian and Middle Eastern instruments such as the Chinese stringed guzheng, the Japanese shakuhachi, and various other flutes and strings—all played by a cast of Swedish musicians—and features rhythms and melodies casually identifiable with all of the above backgrounds along with Ethiopia, Egypt, and Indonesia.
Coordinated or not, Assbring does a remarkably good job taking all of these sounds and fusing them into vibrant, bouncy pop songs that are miles away from the ’60s-inspired tunes of her early career. It wasn’t until 2012’s Pale Fire that Assbring first attempted to seriously change up the El Perro Del Mar sound, but while it was evident that her voice and talents could translate to more radio-friendly dance-pop, the album frequently played like feathery nostalgia for late ’90s lounge house and trip-hop. On KoKoro, however, Assbring seems to have figured out the transition, and its strongest cuts are her best arguments yet for shifting the El Perro Del Mar paradigm.
“Kouign-Amman” (a type of French pastry) blends Assbring’s pan-Asian fetish with spunky futurist pop. Exploding from the speakers with a sunny and reverbed vocals, Assbring weaves in a guzheng string melody in a way that feels organic and enmeshed rather than simply appended. Title track “KoKoro” comes the closest to true 21st-century world music, with a huge, echoing “kinda Middle Eastern” chiftetelli beat and bleating flutes. Assbring’s voice is also loud and present, living in the fabric of the song in a way that it never did on Pale Fire. It’s music for smiling under the late afternoon sun on a party boat on the Bosphorus with a crew of happy hedonists.
Best of all, if not quite as archly pop as the others, is the stunning baroque opener “Endless Ways.” Featuring delicately embedded strings and backing vocals that moan and tug, “Endless Ways” is a perfect synthesis of all of El Perro Del Mar’s developments as an artist. Lyrically it also represents an important touchpoint for Assbring’s transformation, outlining her sense of self-reflection in figuring out how to become a better artist: “I think I was too softly defined/I wish I was all pure/The goal I have is carved in my mind/Perfection is hard.” It sure is, but as pop songs go, “Endless Ways” certainly gets close.
Because of Assbring’s attempts at drawing from these ethnocultural traditions without a sense of clear rhyme or reason, its weaker compositions sound more “White Euro-Woman Does ‘The Far East’” rather than the breezily blended post-globalization culture mashes of M.I.A. Tracks like “Ging Ging” and lead singles “Breadandbutter” and “Ding Sum” don’t just feature the aforementioned guzheng for flair but spotlight it as a conspicuous driver of sound to a degree that feels fetishized rather than borrowed. KoKoro isn’t perfect, but Assbring’s knack for creating well-written, catchy melodies carries the record it even in its slightest moments and a huge step forward from Pale Fire, positioning El Perro Del Mar well for an interesting Act II as a modern world pop purveyor.
