For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) by Japanese Breakfast
For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) by Japanese Breakfast
The fourth Japanese Breakfast album bears an artistically true title. Frontwoman and songwriter Michelle Zauner folds her indie-pop petals into protective desolation after the award nominations and commercial success of 2021’s Jubilee brought her blossoming into bright light and then withering under its glare.
Desolation, not isolation: working for the first time in a full-on recording studio—the L.A.-based Sound City, where difficult creators from Stevie Nicks to Kurt Cobain also worked—she’s accompanied by Blake Mills, who cut his teeth with Jenny Lewis in the indie-rock band Rilo Kiley and whose production occludes none of Zauner’s talents.
Their rich collaboration shines through “Here Is Someone,” which raises a silk-and-lace curtain to reveal celeste, recorder, mandolin, Wurlitzer, and a Hindustani string instrument called the sarod. As Zauner delicately describes a pensive morning-after, this ensemble supports her with chamber-music diffusion as light as gossamer and as strong as classicism.
Because Japanese Breakfast follows that song with “Orlando in Love,” featuring an intelligent string arrangement by Zauner, and also because Mills tends toward layering a minimum of two of his own instrumental abilities onto each track, For Melancholy Brunettes can startle when it gets darker and dirtier.
“Honey Water” rides a stone-simple beat and stunted chords while Zauner updates Helium and Mary Timony’s hissing alt-rock style; “Picture Window” resuscitates a Tom Petty AOR rhythm with pretty phrasing a la Laufey; and “Winter in LA” resembles a super session of Dusty Springfield, Carole King, and Motown backing musicians.
The most emotionally surprising track might be “Men in Bars,” a piano ballad that embodies the witty mellowness and semi-lounge pacing of myriad Warren Zevon deep cuts, but with the additional coloring of pedal steel from Mills and tenderly Kristofferson-wheezy duet vocals from Jeff Bridges.
For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) neither spurns nor soaks in melancholy and sadness. Japanese Breakfast sits with those feelings and assimilates them with beauty and honesty.
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