Much of Swan Lake’s debut echoes like it’s trying to get out of itself, and in the process of self-extrication everything bleeds to death. “All Fires” was a bit misleading, steeped in some of these tremulous pools but still completely centered on Krug’s vestal melody and poignant lyricism. “The Pollenated Girls,” on the other hand, has no center. Mercer’s whispered chatter of “Hamlet’s pressed lips” and white doctrine and brine made of tears is as inscrutable as it is difficult to discern, literal only in its literary allusions. His voice falls behind or trips ahead of the song’s time, Bejar mindlessly noodling along, Krug dropping plinks without care, honey-thick reverb coating their ills.

Halfway through the song Mercer introduces “the pol…le…na…ted girls,” and from that gasp on the music holds its breath, the vapors of its sound slowly expiring in the caverns of its lungs, one brief half-gulp before Mercer enters his last stanza, sprayed with pollen, and then words give way to a drawn, strained, lilting exhale that carries with it the music’s vestiges. It all collapses into murmurs, then silence. An improbable reduction: “The Pollenated Girls” is a song about misery mitigated by death, in this case a blessing. It’s an account told in the present, and its grace is the wonderment and shuddering awe with which it experiences its own demise. That interpretation could be entirely incorrect and/or irrelevant, but perhaps its descriptive truth will stand when you first find yourself immersed in this song’s spill. And I envy you that first listen. Multiple returns to “The Pollenated Girls” are rewarding, certainly, but a bit like trying to lap at memories of a moment past, a singular event that can only really be experienced once because it is something both definitively evanescent and absolute in its finality -- like watching the passing of another’s life, see. No idea what the hell I’m talking about? Again, I envy you that first listen.

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