Each Time You Fall in Love

Each Time You Fall in Love is the album's most bruised track, and it earns that by slowing everything down until the space between notes becomes the subject. The guitar plays in near-silence, a slow-decaying figure with reverb long enough to swallow the next chord; the drums are barely a pulse, more like a hand keeping time on a mattress. Greg Gonzalez sings from the position of the one who has been left behind and has decided not to be bitter about it — the lyric watches a former lover repeat the same falling, the same abandon, with someone new, and offers a strange tenderness rather than accusation. His voice, an unplaceable falsetto often mistaken for a woman's on first listen, makes the observation feel confessional instead of surveillant. The band's Cocteau Twins and Mazzy Star lineage is naked here: nothing accelerates, nothing resolves, the whole thing simply lowers you. It is one of the few pop songs that captures a specific late-twenties recognition — that someone you loved has a pattern, and you were one instance of it. Best heard alone at 2 a.m. with headphones, after an evening you'd rather not describe to anyone.