Japanese Breakfast - For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)

For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is complex - but not complicated - an assured and impressive achievement from a deeply thoughtful artist. 

Japanese Breakfast - the vehicle for multi-talented singer, songwriter and author Michelle Zauner - is back with For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), a follow-up to 2021’s triumphant Jubilee. As the title implies, For Melancholy Brunettes is a more downbeat and reflective affair than its predecessor. But if anything, it’s even more accomplished; an artful and complex record of interlocking layers and references that reveals its rewards gradually. I’d be tempted to go out on a limb even at this early stage and say that it will likely be appearing on many album of the year lists come December.

In essence, For Melancholy Brunettes is an expression of the grief and sadness that Zauner experienced after seemingly attaining everything she’d ever dreamed of: a Grammy nomination for Jubilee followed by a best-selling memoir, Crying in H Mart, which mapped the unsteady trajectory of her early music career against the backdrop of her mother’s death from cancer. Zauner’s previous band were called Little Big League, and with critics flocking to praise both her music and writing, it seemed Japanese Breakfast were poised to break out of the indie scene and onto the big stage. But getting everything you thought you wanted won’t necessarily make you happy - nor will it exorcise the demons that lurk inside.

The album’s cover depicts Zauner slumped over a table piled high with luxurious food and drink. Much like a renaissance painting, the image portrays a skull - the reminder of death - watching over the untouched feast. These literary and classical nods just scratch the surface of a deeper interpretation. For anyone so inclined, there’s a rabbit hole’s worth of references throughout the album; from the story of Leda, a Spartan queen who was seduced by a swan, to Thomas Mann’s visionary reflection on time, illness and death, The Magic Mountain.

Lead single ‘Orlando in Love’, with soaring strings and gently lulling cello, takes its name from the epic Italian renaissance poem, Orlando Innamorato. In this updated retelling, the titular poet parks his Winnebago by the sea but drowns before finishing his last canto. The video, featuring Zauner playing the male protagonist, is also a nod to the genderfluid hero of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography. Like the rest of the album, the arrangement is relatively stripped back with Zauner’s voice in the foreground, which allows the song to be propelled by poise and elegance - in contrast to the explosively celebratory arrangements on Jubilee.

There’s no escaping the fact that For Melancholy Brunettes is a deeply sad record, but like the best ‘sad’ music, Zauner crafts loveliness from melancholy and the result is reassuring. The swelling harps on opener ‘Here is Someone’ create the fantastical sense that you’re entering a dream world, offering something sweet to contrast the bitterness of the line, “Life is sad/But here is someone”. At times, the sweetness almost becomes a bit too syrupy. The production - handled by Blake Mills, whose credits include Bob Dylan, Laura Marling and Fiona Apple among many others - is comparable to the way that Blur’s sound was treated on The Ballad of Darren (another deeply sad album), where it seemed all the hard edges had been smoothed away to give a softly muted polish. Fortunately ‘Honey Water’ brings some guitar-based heaviness and a more muscular sound of piano-tinged art-rock that descends into a gorgeously strung out shoegazey dirge.

The tempo - if not the underlying vibe - picks up with ‘Mega Circuit’. The track feels like a continuation of ‘Savage Good Boy’ on Jubilee, which was sung from the perspective of an Elon Musk-type figure coaxing a woman to join him in an underground bunker after the rest of the world has perished in an apocalypse. A scenario that feels even more horrifyingly likely now; Zauner inhabits the hearts of “young boys, so pissed off and jaded”, imagining herself the lover of someone “plotting blood with their incel eunuchs” and “barrelling round the mega circuit”.

The latter half of the album deals more heavily in its other key theme: male figures failing to live up to the demands of whatever role it is they’re supposed to embody - father, partner, leader. Following the death of her mother in 2014, Zauner became estranged from her father, who moved to Thailand and began a romantic relationship with a much younger woman. Mourning the loss of someone who is still living is depicted as a complicating factor in Zauner’s grief. Before recording For Melancholy Brunettes, they were reconciled to some extent, speaking for the first time in three years on a phone call which Zauner’s father answered with the words, “Tell me everything”. The conversation that followed is poetically recounted on ‘Leda’, a sparse acoustic ballad that meanders through the streets of Crete, over the gulf of time and space that separates father and daughter to conclude with, “I can’t relate to you at all”, suggesting a greater distance between them. Perhaps playing the role of the flawed father figure, Jeff Bridges makes an appearance on the piano-led bar ballad, ‘Men in Bars’, the closest the album veers towards mawkishness or even self-parody. But something about the sheer far-fetchedness of finding Jeff Bridges pop-up on a Japanese Breakfast album just about carries it off.

For all the weighty themes of grief, loss and self-identity, and the density of references contained within, this is a slender record with ten tracks across half an hour. While the production is lush and luxurious at times, with harps, strings, pedal steel and Zauner’s own girlish voice woven through everything, the strength of the songwriting wears the baroqueness lightly. Melancholy never descends into despair, and self-doubt never becomes self-pity. Some might prefer a sound with more grit and less polish, but taking her inspiration from Romantic literature, Zauner is asking us to suspend disbelief even if just for half an hour. For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is complex - but not complicated - an assured and impressive achievement from a deeply thoughtful artist.