If Japanese Breakfast were a ship at sail, it might seem like the band came into berth only in the last few years. In 2021 the explosive success of their third album ‘Jubilee’ netted them Grammy nods, headline tours and universal acclaim (the same year frontwoman Michelle Zauner published her phenomenally successful memoir Crying In H-Mart). But the band has lived many sonic lives at sea, charting an ever-changing course from discordant melancholia on ‘Psychopomp’ and ‘Soft Sounds From Another Planet’ to bright, joyous technicolour on ‘Jubilee’.
Now, with their fourth album, produced by Blake Mills [Fiona Apple, Perfume Genius], they’ve pulled into harbour in a renaissance painting. True to the literary whimsy of its title, ‘For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women)’ sounds like living inside a classical piece of art, every detail an elaborate brushstroke.
On the luscious opener ‘Here Is Someone’, a chorus of strings – replete with Indonesian gamelan and Hindustani sarod – falls softly like a delicate rain. The single ‘Orlando in Love’, an ode to the 68 and a half epic cantos of Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo, lilts between luminous cello strings with the ceremonial pace of a ballroom dance, all while Zauner spins a tale of a lovestruck poet perishing at sea, lured to his death by a siren’s call.
The album is buoyed, too, by a journeying feeling, distinct from ‘Jubilee’’s fixation on joy and release (and from the grief that defined its predecessors). ‘For Melancholy Brunettes’ feels propelled by a physical sense of story, as Zauner sings of “returning to flatlands / a new man, a new man” (‘Magic Mountains’) and recounts “Grecian gods… crashing of waves, a sculpture of Leda and the swan” (‘Leda’).
As in classical art, beauty belies bloodshed. The duality of light and dark – the lick of honey on the edge of a knife – has always been a focal point of Zauner’s songwriting, the delicious tension at the heart of songs like ‘Savage Good Boy’ and ‘Slide Tackle’. Here, she sings of “plotting blood with your incel eunuchs” on the jaunty ‘Mega Circuit’, and in between gentle guitar plucking on ‘Little Girl’, of a father’s tragic, unrequited love for his daughter: “Pissing in the corner of a hotel suite… Dreaming of a daughter who won’t speak to me.”
An acrid feeling pervades these artful scenes, like ladies walking through the streets of olde London with oranges under their noses to ward off the stench of plague. Opulence is the perfect playground for Zauner’s spiky sensibilities, an allegorical minefield for the morbidity and bloodiness of our hedonistic modern existences. No one nails that like Japanese Breakfast.
