.

.

.

Photo Credit: Pak Bae

.

After a decade making the most of improvised recording spaces set in warehouses, trailers and lofts, Japanese Breakfast’s fourth album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), due March 21st on Dead Oceans, marks the band’s first proper studio release. Produced by Grammy Award winner Blake Mills — an innovator of uncommon subtlety, known for his work with everyone from Bob Dylan to Fiona Apple and quietly regarded as many a legacy artist’s favourite guitar player — and tracked at the venerable Sound City in Los Angeles — birthplace of After The Gold Rush, Fleetwood Mac and Nevermind among other classics — the record sees front-woman and songwriter Michelle Zaunerpull back from the bright extroversion that defined its predecessor Jubilee to examine the darker waves that roil within, the moody, fecund field of melancholy, long held to be the psychic state of poets on the verge of inspiration. The result is an artistic statement of purpose: a mature, intricate, contemplative work that conjures the romantic thrill of a gothic novel.

For Melancholy Brunettes follows a transformative period in Zauner’s life during which her GRAMMY nominated breakthrough album Jubilee and her bestselling memoir Crying In H Mart catapulted her into the cultural mainstream, delivering on her deepest artistic ambitions. Reflecting on that success, Zauner came to appreciate the irony of desire, which so often commingles bliss and doom. “I felt seduced by getting what I always wanted,” she says. “I was flying too close to the sun, and I realised if I kept going I was going to die.”

.

.

The plight of Icarus and other such condemned ones lends For Melancholy Brunettes its most persistent theme, the perils of desire. Like light dispersed, its spectral parts take the album’s characters through cycles of temptation, transgression and retribution. On the album’s lead single ‘Orlando in Love‘— a riff on John Cheever’s riff on Orlando Innamorato, an unfinished epic made up of 68 ½ cantos by the Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo — the hero is a well-meaning poet who parks his Winnebago by the sea and falls victim to a siren’s call, his 69th canto (even in the lofty realm of classical myth Zauner has a soft spot for innuendo).

Though Zauner has experimented with science fiction on Soft Sounds from Another Planet and buoyant surrealism on Jubilee, the landscape of European Romanticism that underpins For Melancholy Brunettes and the dense tissue of classical allusion that comes with it marks new territory for a songwriter entering her artistic maturity. She credits a range of antecedents with inspiration. The forlorn café girl in Degas’ “L’absinthe”. The seascapes of Caspar David Friedrich. The passionate longing and wild, undulating moors in Wuthering Heights. Hans Castorp wrapped in his camel hair blanket, dreaming on the Berghof balcony. It is an atmosphere made palpable by the intricate, interlocking guitar arrangements that accompany much of the record, lapping like waves over the meter, often as oblique in their expression of the chord as Zauner can be in her polyvalence of feeling and insight.

Sadness is the dominant emotional key of this record, but it is sadness of a rarified form: the pensive, prescient sadness of melancholy, in which the recognition of life’s essentially tragic character occurs with sensitivity to its fleeting beauty. Zauner finds space enough inside it for glimmers of hope. They are the consolations of mortals that poets before her have called out to and that poets after will continue to rediscover: love and labour, and though they run like tonic resolutions through the record’s many episodes.

.

‘ORLANDO IN LOVE’ 
OUT NOW
BUY/STREAM HERE

JAPANESE BREAKFAST 
FOR MELANCHOLY BRUNETTES (& SAD WOMEN)
ALBUM OUT 21 MARCH VIA DEAD OCEANS
PRE-SAVE HERE

For Melancholy Brunettes
(& Sad Women)
Track List:

1. Here is Someone
2. Orlando in Love
3. Honey Water
4. Mega Circuit
5. Little Girl
6. Leda
7. Picture Window
8. Men in Bars (Feat. Jeff Bridges)
9. Winter in LA
10. Magic Mountain

.

.

Follow JAPANESE BREAKFAST
WEBSITE
FACEBOOK
X
INSTAGRAM
BANDCAMP
SPOTIFY
APPLE MUSIC

.

.

AMNPLIFY – DB