For almost twenty years now, Sweden’s Sarah Assbring has been bringing haunting, airy electronica as El Perro Del Mar, both during that sound’s boom time and beyond. For her latest album, Big Anonymous, Assbring gets very intimate and tragic, before finally finding the light, or at least acceptance of the dark.
From the instrumental intro “Underworld” onward, Anonymous is a journey through that underworld, through crushing loss. It’s relatively stripped down, a little removed in the first half with songs such as “Suburban Dreams”, but after the instrumental interlude “The Truth the Dead Know” comes to the intimate air of “Between You and Me Nothing” & the fuzzed longing of “Please Stay”. That leads to the very slow footsteps into grandeur of “One More Time”. It all culminates in the penultimate crushing sadness of “Wipe Me Off This Earth”, but thankfully is followed by the grand acceptance of the sorrow, “Kiss of Death”, a (relatively) bright track to finish.
An odyssey of an album for when you’re weeping at home, Big Anonymous is something to take on, rather than breezily dip into. Like death, like El Perro Del Mar.
