Japanese Breakfast’s soothing album For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women) lacks the piquant flavours of her prose
Michelle Zauner’s fourth indie-pop album as Japanese Breakfast might be titled For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), but it paints stronger portraits of hideous men. The Korean-American artist introduces us to a guy who is “plotting blood with your incel eunuchs” and “gonna make me suffer the way I should” on “Mega Circuit”; to a lost world of “Men in Bars”; to a cheater (“Honey Water”) and an alcoholic with a “special way of ruining the mood” (“Leda”). In each song, the singer assumes a submissive persona, her sweet, breathy voice carried on muddy currents of lo-fi grunge and trapped with these unappealing guys in a kind of sonic Stockholm syndrome. “Sucked you off by the AC unit,” she croons, equal parts beguiling and bored, “I could be the home you need.”
It’s a shift back to the dark side for Zauner. Her first two albums, 2016’s Psychopomp and 2017’s Soft Sounds from Another Planet, channelled the grief she felt in the wake of her mother’s death from pancreatic cancer. Her golden-toned 2021 record Jubilee, meanwhile, was an attempt to capture joy as her brilliant, New York Times bestselling memoir, Crying in H Mart, soaked up all the sorrow. I loved the book’s raw, original evocation of a stubborn only child’s difficult relationship with a strict single mother and the bittersweet insight Zauner gave into her relationship with Korean culture.
It’s just a shame the music doesn’t possess the umami flavours of her prose. After opening with the rotating twinkle of a boot sale music box, it jogs pleasantly through phases of mellow grunge with countrified guitar jangle, drums and arcing piano. I leaned right into the Mongolian pony trot strum and east Asian semi-tone strings of “Orlando in Love”, and The Mamas & the Papas-indebted twang and tambourine of “Winter in LA”. But the whole thing can float by like Portland coffee shop background noise.
In interviews about this album – all of which I found more piquant than the record itself – Zauner spoke about her literary inspiration. Her title comes from a 1951 John Cheever story called “The Chimera”, about an unhappily married man attempting to rekindle a doomed affair. She said she was tapping into the Gothic spirit of proto-feminist authors such as the Brontes and Mary Shelley in her attempt to stitch new life from the gory parts of her pain. She’s also spoken about listening to a lot of Björk and Kate Bush: women who stretched their weirdness into wild shapes in the studio.
So why is Zauner playing it so safe? She’s a terrific storyteller with the potential to really push her troubling tales into fresh audio spaces. Interestingly, she told Marie Claire she’s “never really identified as a singer”. Her soothing voice, though very lovely, doesn’t always sell the cleverness of her lyrics. I imagine some of the foul men she’s sending up might even play this record and enjoy such demure aural therapy without realising that they’re the ones she’s skewering.
Of course, that sly stealth will be part of the appeal for some. I’ve been playing the record for days and feel soothed by its featherlike finger-picking, warm recorders and earthy cellos. The closing track, “Magic Mountain”, certainly sounds like it was made by people who listened to a lot of Nick Drake – never a bad thing. It also offers hope. After all the toxic masculinity her characters have handled, Zauner hopes for “a new man, a new man” while keeping her late mother’s X-ray in a locket. Peace, at last.
