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Final Fantasy/El Perro Del Mar
Conway Hall, June 4th 2006

You can’t help feeling that Sarah – the detached, slightly otherworldly voice and songwriting core of El Perro Del Mar – must wish she was a little bit shorter. She’s all limbs and knees and elbows as she gets ready to perform, biting her lip in concentration, and she plays hunched over, as if she’s trying to hide from the audience while singing her insecure heart out to it. She has the looks of a well-to-do Swedish socialite (the press shot of her in society attire holding a small dog is priceless), but her demeanour’s anything but privileged – she’s pursed and tentative and folded up, an apology in body language.

Unsurprisingly, her songs follow suit. The opening “This Loneliness” is essentially a simple affair – Sarah strumming an acoustic while two compadres add soft touches of Hammond and electric guitar – but there’s something in her echoey voice that sounds broken somehow. The breezier “Dog”, the tambourine beat set by Sarah’s tapping foot, could be Kate Bush gone slightly lo-fi, were it not for the central lyric: “All the feelings you’ve got for me/It’s like for a dog”. At times, it seems like she’s torturing herself in the most polite fashion imaginable.

And that’s the telling crux about El Perro Del Mar. Tweak these songs just slightly and you’d be deep in Radio Two Sweden territory – refined, slightly distressed, well orchestrated. She never reaches the emotional depths or extremes visited by someone like Stina Nordenstam – instead she’s like a haunted take on MOR, possibly too shy or folded up to really reveal herself. But within that pursed, polite, damaged air there’s something that’s quietly intriguing. As she sings herself on the glorious “God Knows”: “I’ve been taking a lot without giving it back.” Watching this one unravel is going to be interesting.

With Final Fantasy – or Owen Pallett to his nearest and dearest – almost the opposite is the case. He starts with nothing, just him and a stage and a violin. And he plays a simple violin sequence, nothing that you take immediate notice of, just something to ease us into his first piece. Then he’s layering something else on top of that, and you’re not really thinking what’s going on, you’re just enjoying how it’s all quietly building. Then he adds in another motif, which starts to repeat over the top of everything else…and then he takes his hands off his instrument to sing, and everything just carries on playing around him.

This is the schtick. Working a series of samplers with foot pedals, Pallett is essentially a one man orchestra and a one man recording studio, creating amazingly intricate pieces of music right off the hoof. Once you realise he’s recording pieces as he’s going, you start to lose track of what’s real and what isn’t – there’ll be times when he appears to be playing something but then he reaches up for the mic and he isn’t playing at all. He’d stopped feeding the loop 40 seconds or so earlier. And so it becomes a magic trick as well as a musical performance, like watching the broomsticks in “Fantasia” come to life and dance for your entertainment.

Musically, he’s free to go anywhere. One song sounds like the Postal Service – he builds up two violin parts which become the glitchy beat, layers some more melody over the top, and then begins to sing. Other tunes are closer to his erstwhile employers in the Arcade Fire (he was their string arranger). And wherever he goes, the response is as astonishing as his performance: almost deafening rapture. This is one party trick that isn’t going to remain private for very much longer.

Ian Watson

Photo: Dianne Cooper

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