Japanese Breakfast - "For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women)"
Lush and Vibrant Melancholia
If there is a crossroads between Dream Pop and Indie Rock, that’s where you’ll find Japanese Breakfast. If you’re looking for dreamy, lush, melancholy atmosphere, this album is a must.
For Melancholy Brunettes is only the fourth full-length effort from Japanese Breakfast, and it exists in full defiance of the band’s roots.
Bandleader and founder Michelle Zauner started Japanese Breakfast as a “low-expectations side project” (as Mia Hughes of Stereogum writes as a precursor to an interview with Zauner) in 2013.
Her “main” project at the time?
Philly-based indie/Emo/Punk outfit Little Big League.1
But that act broke up in 2016, just as Japanese Breakfast was releasing its first LP.
Good thing, then, that Japanese Breakfast has been more successful than the original band.
This is the second Japanese Breakfast album that I’ve reviewed, and the band has really honed in on this reverb-laden lushness on For Melancholy Brunettes which I don’t really recall being present on Jubilee. And the thing that really sticks out in the soundscape is that the composition structure somehow seems to encompass little bits of silent void which are every bit as important as the actual instrumentation.
Maybe it’s a trick of the reverb, but the silence echoes as much as everything else.
There are also several sections with gorgeously-layered steel guitar lines.
Most of the album is rather downbeat (which comes as no surprise, given the title), with only “Picture Window” providing any sort of true energy. And on a straight listen, several songs begin to sound a bit samey and run together, which feels like a bigger issue than normal because the album’s ten songs only total just over thirty minutes.
Which means that if it were truly at full LP length (40-45 minutes), it would become a bit of a slog due to lack of variety.
Still, the album is gorgeous, and there isn’t a song here that I won’t enjoy mixed into playlists. And I haven’t even mentioned the Jeff fucking Bridges feature!
If you like Dream or Chamber Pop or anything with lush atmospherics, give this one a listen!
Rating: Teal
Full disclosure: after sampling some of Little Big League’s songs, Japanese Breakfast is definitely a better fit for Zauner. LBL was having trouble finding its edge. Any edge. Everything feels too soft or rounded off for the genres it’s credited as (Punk? Emo? Noise Rock? Nah, I don’t buy it; they were never going anywhere on that front).
The same sensibilities which take center stage in Japanese Breakfast were noticeably present in the four songs I listened to from LBL. And the genric differences between any other two bands with those labels would be pretty stark and self-evident.