Isn’t it somewhat enjoyable, typically, to be unhappy? On her fourth studio album as Japanese Breakfast, For Melancholy Brunettes (& Unhappy Ladies), Michelle Zauner luxuriates within the aesthetics of the titular emotion. Plush beds of strings recall days spent wallowing between the sheets—presumably silk—whereas sweeping references to Leda, Icarus, and Venus evoke heartache and craving of mythological proportions. Within the self-directed music video for the romantic lead single, “Orlando in Love,” Zauner dons a hat and tights to play the buccaneering Renaissance poet she sings about. The misty, candlelit vignette is a becoming introduction to a document on which Zauner drapes her unhappiness round her like a dressing up.
This isn’t to accuse Zauner of inauthenticity, however reasonably to say that this document is a winkingly adventurous one. Zauner’s earlier albums have been every their very own type of intimate emotional archaeology: She traced grief and heartache on her lo-fi debut, Psychopomp, and burst with ebullient, synth-dappled pleasure on her closest factor to a pop document, Jubilee, in 2021. Alongside Jubilee, Zauner additionally revealed the vastly profitable Crying in H Mart, a young and devastating memoir concerning the demise of her mom and her relationship together with her Korean heritage. After the latter album and guide propelled her to new ranges of consideration, Zauner described feeling as if she have been “sitting at a poker desk and… simply profitable hand after hand and [being] so afraid of shedding the whole time.” Her intense tour schedule led to well being nervousness and stress-induced diseases, undercutting the general public profession highs with non-public lows. It’s maybe no shock that, regardless of being finest identified for her autobiographical work, on this launch she turns her lens outwards, roaming via fictional landscapes and analyzing the performances and perils of fame itself.
For Melancholy Brunettes is Zauner’s fourth full-length launch, but in addition, in a method, her first studio album: Whereas earlier albums have been recorded in makeshift DIY areas, this one benefitted from using bonafide recording studios and the enter of famend producer Blake Mills (Fiona Apple, Fragrance Genius). The distinction in Zauner’s sound is palpable, from the very second the opening ballad “Right here Is Somebody” glitters to life with spectral strings and segues into the gradual march of “Orlando.” Regardless of its orchestral, Romantic (with a capital R) beginnings, the document rapidly turns towards the sepia soundscapes of nation music, its melancholia taking form as metallic guitar twangs and rolling percussion.
At simply half an hour, this can be a slight album, regardless of moments of heart-bursting ambition that at instances go away you wishing for extra to sink your tooth into. The spare ballad “Little Woman” trickles previous pleasantly like a effervescent stream, as does “Males in Bars,” a plaintive duet with Jeff Bridges. The album’s extra propulsive moments are its most spectacular: “Mega Circuit” is a grunge-y, mud-slinging tackle the Andrew Tate-ification of younger males with woozy slide guitar and jaunty piano, its sinister shuffle bringing to life the methods through which unhappiness can metastasize into vitriol and hatred. “Honey Water,” a rollicking rock track advised from the embittered perspective of the spouse of a serial cheater, glides its method into essentially the most cathartic of psychedelic breakdowns, dazzling in its rage.
The scene-stealer is “Image Window,” a story of affection and its vital companion, loss. The track’s double-edged hook—“All of my ghosts are actual,” Zauner intones cheerfully over a darkish, insistent guitar thrum—is considered one of her most extravagantly melancholic moments. However simply on the opposite aspect of it, the instrumentation coils tightly, leaving her voice naked and uncovered as she sings of the pre-emptive terror of imagining the demise of somebody you like greater than life itself. Even at her most theatrical, Zauner’s songwriting crackles with these electrical moments of intimacy, pulling you shut sufficient to see the tears drying within the stage make-up.
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