“It’s easy babe / to make it hard.” This El Perro Del Mar chanteuse Sarah Assbring offers as the central conceit of “How Did We Forget,” the first single from her much-anticipated (by me) new record. Well, fair enough. Several repeats later, then, “it’s easy babe / to make it bad.” Um. “Easy / Easy” the background Assbringers coo. Yikes.

Nothing happens in this song. Catchy tunes shouldn’t have to work very hard, but they do need to move from point A to point B. This one abruptly stops on the same two-chord triplet roll that it floated in on. The horns could’ve been an event, if they’d entered in the outro, kicking the energy up a notch and bringing it all on home. Instead they arrive at 0:53, thus forming the song’s selfsame texture throughout. So: two-chord piano roll. Ultra-general/
meaningless platitude. This for two minutes until, at exactly 2:01, everything drops but the bass and several Assbringers singing “how did we forget about our love?” Twice. Then, a repeat of the roll to bring things to a close.

On her debut, Assbring was able to bring her trademark dreamy gloom to full-fledged, if somewhat repetitive, songs. Here, the pendulum swings too far in one direction: all mood, no substance. Is this an anti-single? If a single is in some sense supposed to whet our appetite and provide a window into the forthcoming LP, in what sense does “How Did We Forget” offer something to register in the mind, something that will stick and make me part with my sweaty, coloured money? It’s so incomplete it could be an interlude in a rock opera, or an incomprehensible episode in a real song’s trippy dream. Perhaps that’s the genius of it. Send out your filler, your liminal moments, as your single. It’s supposed to stand apart from, and represent a highpoint, of your album, but you’re giving a middle-finger salute to the system and (gosh darnnit!) daring listeners to take your album as one cohesive artistic utterance which cannot be butchered by crass commercialism.

Or, or! In this most presidential primary of seasons, perhaps Assbring’s pre-release plan is modeled on the classic pre-election strategy of lowering expectations. The idea is to talk a bunch of guff in front of reporters about how you stink real bad and you’re definitely not going to do very well in the Virginia Democratic Primary. That way if you win it’s a huge amazing upset, and if you don’t it’s no story because we all expected it anyway. So yeah. Maybe it’s like that.

Sending “How Did We Forget” out as your starting line is either the work of an ironic genius (surely her bench is deeper than this) or it’s a bad sign. I guess we’ll have to wait until From the Valley to the Stars drops to know for sure.

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