Japanese Breakfast
For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)
DEAD OCEANS
ABOVE THE CURRENT
In recent years, Michelle Zauner has jumped into the mainstream zeitgeist with her GRAMMY-nominated breakthrough album as Japanese Breakfast, Jubilee, and her bestselling memoir Crying in H Mart. That 2021 LP was sweet and honeyed like a dream-pop persimmon, whereas prior experiments such as Soft Sounds From Another Planet were steeped in lo-fi shoegaze. Yet Zauner gets downright contemplative on her fourth album, sampling a few different flavors. The glimmering and morose For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) was recorded with bombast at Los Angeles’ Sound City with in-demand producer and guitarist Blake Mills, who lends these songs a focus on understated guitar-pop charm and dynamic ranges. Building off Jubilee’s bubbly synths and sanguine dream-rock melodies, Melancholy Brunettes sinks in more than it leans forward. Anyone who listened to Zauner’s ambient-pop soundtrack for the indie exploration video game Sable may not be surprised by this emphasis on sparse and unpredictable melancholia.
The perils of yearning for admiration and love despite a mountain of success is the central theme coursing through all 10 tracks on Melancholy Brunettes, but Zauner explained in recent interviews that the title is “a little bit tongue-in-cheek.” Regardless, the bowed female bodies in paintings by Edgar Degas and Ramon Casas and the solitary seascapes of Caspar David Friedrich inspired Zauner, while Frederick Elwell’s “The Wedding Dress,” Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, and Gothic romance classics like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Frankenstein all served as powerful touchstones of female despair, oftentimes at the hands of scheming men. Even the album cover showcases Zauner as a Brontë-esque character face down like Casas’ “Tired” on a table surrounded by a bountiful feast. That portrait of being exhausted in your daily yearning kept popping up for Zauner. She admits to googling her name and reading comments sections.
Slimy men—a Gothic novel hallmark—also dot the landscape midway through the album where genres and pacing get twisted up. “Honey Water” examines the simmering rage of a woman married to a two-faced husband. The song sounds like an avalanche of thumping drums, a cliff of guitars, and stacked distortion as Zauner’s lyrics equate the man to an insatiable insect, shining more than the music itself: “The lure of honey water draws you from my arms so needy / You follow in colonies to sip it from the bank / In rapturous sweet temptation, you wade in past the edge and sink in / Insatiable for a nectar drinking til your heart expires.” Another human done in by desire.
“Mega Circuit” is one of the album’s darker tracks and is marinated in minor keys as we’re introduced to a stalking group of incels. Zauner’s lyrics read like a hardboiled detective paperback mixed with the more familiar Gothic tones: “Shooting blanks off a blacktop surface / Blue light cast from a sodium beam / Sucked you off by the AC unit / Caught your breath while the evening steeped.” In contrast, one of the most emotionally arresting songs on the album, “Little Girl,” enjoys a beautiful guitar melody similar to Soft Sounds From Another Planet’s “Till Death.” Japanese Breakfast’s love for lo-fi dream-pop guitars returns for the acoustic “Leda,” a drunken dream of a song that faces similar relationship predicaments. Many of Melancholy Brunettes’s Gothic dreamers are indeed not just sad women, but men in full self-destruct mode, castigating women in vaulted towers or just apartment complexes, bowing and breaking themselves daily.
This tension culminates with ”Men in Bars,” Japanese Breakfast’s odd country murder ballad in the style of Kenny Rogers’ “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” sung here as a duet with Jeff Bridges. Over piano and pedal steel, Zauner and Bridges depict another relationship on the cliff, facing impending doom. The rest of the album moves through glacial Laurel Canyon strings on the pop-rock number “Winter in LA” to an Aimee Mann–like urban cowgirl pop song in “Picture Window.” The closer flits back to literature again as Zauner retells Mann’s Magic Mountain. After a listen or two, we must return to the women with heads on tables, though. Maybe some of the savage good boys relegating For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) as another “sad girl” album could ponder the source of this sadness. Even in the 21st century, it’s possible.
