There's no positive way to spin the "it's not you, it's me" routine. Even if you manage to believe it, all you're left with is a blatant insult—"you are not worth the effort." This is the challenge Braids faces on "Taste", the chorus of which uses "it's not you, it's me" as an apology rather than a cop-out (or at least as a proxy for make-up sex). At first, Raphaelle Standell-Preston seems to be ruefully reminiscing on a relationship she let slip away: "We experience the love that we think we deserve/ And I guess I thought I didn't need much from this world/ So I left you." This makes it easy to empathize with her, given the desperation of the next line: "But you're exactly what I like/ I will give you my whole life." What follows after is a very telling indication that this conversation is taking place in the present tense, and the context is made quite clear: "Mmm, you taste so nice/ Oh, this feels so right."-=-=-=-

It's fitting Standell-Preston should be so vulnerable and pleasure-seeking on "Taste", Braids' most pure pop song. After compartmentalizing their brazen sensuality on Native Speaker and cerebral introversion within Flourish // Perish's chilly electronics, the Montreal trio appears to have hit a long-promised balance between the two. But if "Taste" sounds like a reconciliation, there's a disturbing foreshadowing that the narrator is addressing the man or woman of their violent dreams: "Will you push me up against this wall/ And spit all your hurt on me/ So I can feel my reach." There is ownership but not necessarily empowerment: "Taste" is complex, it's messy, and it reveals the confusion only hinted at when Standell-Preston whispered "I'm fucked up" ad infinitum on "Glass Deers" four years ago.