ALBUM REVIEW: Japanese Breakfast - For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)
Beauty behind the sadness.
I am neither a melancholy brunette (proud redhead) or a sad woman, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling much of what Michelle Zauner usually sings about. She’s no stranger to singing about sadness, whether it’s about personal loss, her family’s past, or the concept of love itself. It’s powered her band to some incredible heights, and much of For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) was recorded after a stint in South Korea where she further reacquainted herself with her Korean heritage. It’s the band’s most organic work in a while, focusing on Zauner’s guitar work and orchestral arrangements to set the appropriately melancholic mood.
The band’s 2021 album Jubilee found joy in its synthpop inspirations, so a shift back to traditional indie instrumentation to foster more pensive emotions makes sense. But make no mistake, the often dour thoughts Zauner has don’t cause the instrumentals to lack emotion themselves. The strong string work on lead single “Orlando In Love” gives the track a milky richness, as does the instrumental flourish towards the end of “Winter in LA”. At times she and her bandmates lean into a little country, like on “Mega Circuit” and “Men in Bars”, the latter of which features movie star Jeff Bridges. It’s a nice wrinkle to those tracks, even if it’s not expanded on as much as one might want. The overall instrumental approach is a beautiful one, but tracks can find themselves aimlessly going on for too long at times.
Zauner is a celebrated writer in multiple ways, and she shows her skill plenty of times on For Melancholy Women (& sad women). Her approach to anxiety on “Picture Window” is one of the album’s best, singing about her ghosts and her partner’s inability to see things the way she does. Obtuse imagery of “Orlando In Love” melds itself well with the ornate strings. Things can be a little heavy handed, like when poking fun at modern masculinity on “Mega Circuit”, but those moments are saved by the beauty of the instrumental. The biggest shame is that a lot of songs don’t feature that many lyrics to begin with, opting to focus on the scenery rather than the dialogue. It’s the mark of a good artist to tell stories through different means across different works, but after the strong, tight songwriting of Jubilee, something feels a little lacking here.
Perhaps the best thing about Japanese Breakfast’s 4th album is it turns melancholy into something more than a negative feeling. It’s simply a state of being we often find ourselves in, and rather than let it control their lives, Zauner and company have learned to live with it. For as transcendent of a talent as she can be, Michelle Zauner is human like the rest of us, and For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is an exercise in accepting the saddest parts of ourselves as normal. Through its frequent beauty, it frequently succeed.
Verdict: 7.6/10
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