Sunset

"Sunset" is Polachek's flamenco excursion, and its audacity is that it commits completely. Built with Danny L Harle, the song rides Spanish guitar figures, hand-percussion and palmas-style claps, castanet clicks, and a nylon-string melody that would sound like pastiche if the writing weren't so strong. The chord movement is sun-drunk and slightly modal, the tempo an unhurried sway, and the whole thing is mixed with a dryness that keeps it from becoming a postcard. Polachek sings in a lower, more grounded register than usual here, with her signature vocal ornaments deployed as flourishes rather than as the main structural event — though the "you're my man, you're my man" refrain lifts into that airy, elastic top range that only she has. The lyric plays on the double sense of sunset as both an ending and the most beautiful part of the day: a love observed at its most golden precisely because it's tilting toward dark. There's a heat-warped, vacation-in-a-foreign-city quality to the imagery, sensual and slightly unmoored. Released as a standalone single ahead of Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, it announced that album's globe-hopping, unembarrassed romanticism. Perfect for a balcony in late evening, a glass of something cold, the light going orange.