For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) - Japanese Breakfast: Review
Review by Lavender:
Japanese Breakfast is the project of singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner, who has spent nearly a decade now writing some of the most interesting, playful, and versatile music in the world of indie pop and rock. Her appeal spanned new peaks in 2021 with her third album Jubilee, where songs like "Be Sweet" and "Paprika" showed off a more vibrant and poppy side to her sound and found critical acclaim doing so. My favorite Japanese Breakfast album remains her 2017 outing Soft Sounds From Another Planet, which used playful atmosphere and entrancing space to highlight her abilities as a writer. After hearing some of that quiet poise in the singles for this record, I was hoping for a triumphant return to that style. But it is not what I got.
Let's talk highlights first, because the album does have some. Lead single "Orlando In Love" is a track I hoped I would like more within the context of the album. It's a gentle track that could serve well as a breezier tone setter or interlude type track. I think the hook is decent but I could imagine a much better version of this song that's performed with any energy whatsoever. The real highlights are deeper in the tracklist, starting with "Honey Water." It has one of the better and more involved instrumentals with distant drums and guitar layers with sprinkles of distortion worked in. Among a tracklist that feels so scant in energy, it's a breath of fresh air.
Later on the record serves up "Picture Window" which has another lively instrumental. More importantly, though, when it shifts into a spacier atmosphere more reminiscent of Soft Sounds it makes for a really beautiful moment. "Winter In LA" has a delightful jangling beat and the way Michelle coos out the hook is infectious.
But that gets to a different problem on the record. The worst part of this record is its utterly drab sonic palette. The absence of the peppier instrumentation introduced on Jubilee doesn't lead to any more compelling intimacy or gentle space on the other end. Instead, the sound of the record is lifeless even when the songwriting is there. Opener "Here Is Someone" features some plinky keys and strings that don't hold up at all to any of the actually good refrains the song has to offer. The single "Mega Circuit" is the same thing with a decently catchy series of refrains that get old so quickly with the complete lack of any sonic impact.
The worst offender is "Little Girl," a genuine triumph in songwriting. Michelle explores the perspective of a father recollection on how his daughter became estranged and how he can get her back. Despite that excellent framing and the gorgeous ways she extrapolates it, the song is utterly nothing sonically. In fact, this was the point where I had to go back and really check that this album was produced by Blake Mills, whose work with Perfume Genius is some of the liveliest and most flavorful in the last decade of indie music. Despite his poise as a producer and arranger, songs like this sound like something from the Selena Gomez Benny Blanco album.
While tracks that leave absolutely no impression at all like "Leda" and "Magic Mountain" are bad, the song I hate the most on the album is "Men In Bars." What a fucking mess. The song of the sound is boring, but in an overwrought way and for some fucking reason it's a duet with Jeff Bridges. His over-singing is so unbearable, it's like he's performing a comedy song and the pair have absolutely no chemistry together.
I'm kind of just stunned by Melancholy Brunettes. I could imagine Japanese Breakfast having a down album, one less interesting than prior outings. But this is a complete dud, the likes of which I would have never expected. Somehow, the talents of Michelle Zauner and Blake Mills can't combine to make almost any compelling instrumentals through a dedication to minimal instrumentation and understated performances. While I've loved plenty of gentle music, like the Ichiko Aoba album from earlier this year, Melancholy doesn't find anything interesting in that conversion process. What results is an album so much more innocuous than I ever imagined Michelle making and one of the most surprising disappointments of the year so far. 4.5/10
