El Perro Del Mar, El Perro Del Mar

The seventh song on the second record from El Perro Del Mar is called "Coming Down the Hill," and thinking of the album as Kate Bush in reverse is not a bad place to start. El Perro has all of Bush's faerie-like ethereality, but in place of her theatrical flourishes are downbeat moans, excruciating self-doubt and backing vocals that sound like they're being supplied by a doped-up girl group.

Sarah Assbring — El Perro Del Mar's one and only member — is a willful naïf with a waifish soprano and a childlike cadence; if that combination is occasionally a bit precious, the album's desperate melancholy more than makes up for it. "Party" is desolate as a beach at midnight, just a dry strum and ghostlike backing vocals. "I Can't Talk About It" is aching and eerie, a scratched-up Motown 45 playing on the wrong speed in an empty house at 3:00 in the morning. Assbring's motifs run counter to her sentiment: she re-works the sock-hop sound until it's dewy and hopeless, party music for a party of one. Though the record is purportedly inspired by actual events, it's better to think of Assbring's sadness as a conceit rather than a testimonial. No matter how sincere, the refrain, "This loneliness ain't pretty no more," gets hard to take when it's repeated upwards of five times.

The record comes into its own on "God Knows (You Gotta Get to Give)" a swaying shoop-shoop song where Assbring intones Julee Cruise-like: "God knows I've been taking a lot without giving back." El Perro Del Mar doesn't completely reverse that equation — Assbring demands an awful lot over its 30 minutes — but it does wrest some fragile, tender songs from her life of want.