El Perro Del Mar

El Perro Del Mar: dog of the sea. Curious choice of moniker for a melancholic Swedish chanteuse, but if your name was Sarah Assbring you'd probably adopt a nom de rock as well. Name aside, El Perro Del Mar's signature song, "God Knows," is one honey of a bummer. Essentially a 19-word incantation over a Bacharach-like arrangement, it's delivered in a voice akin to a chronically depressed Petula Clark on a prescription holiday. Refreshingly, the source of her misery isn't an uninterested lover or a hardscrabble childhood, but rather her own admission of unabashed selfishness. "God knows I've been taking a lot without giving back," she sings over and over again, concluding, "You gotta give to get back to the light." In lesser hands the repetition would grate, but Assbring's got the moxie — however muted — to make all of this syncopated despair bearable, and even a little hopeful. It gets my vote for feel-bad song of the year.