Album Review: Japanese Breakfast - For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)
- Lammbi
- 1 hour ago
- 2 min read
Approaching things with a smaller, yet still poignant scale, Michelle Zauner manages to keep things fascinating. Despite feeling lacking in the compositional and lyrical aspect, ‘For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)’ has enough depth and warmth to allow the lush melancholy to find its stride.
‘For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)’ is an exhale for all the acclaim laid upon Michelle Zauner for the past few years, a briefly needed relaxation settled in lush isolation, where she can obsess over Greek mythos and embrace the melancholic emotions without any pushback at all. Taking this time to write about the relationships and their underlying imbalance, observing how men will act upon their expected ideals towards women and just how flawed it might be, especially when they get to be fathers later on and how that attitude can be a negative effect on their wives and daughters. A rather frustrating situation for women who get to be in these specific relationships, where it’s always them who have to give so much of themselves, as their embrace of melancholia tends to be stomped by their male partners who don’t get to understand or empathize why they feel those emotions.
That lyrical depth gets paired with Blake Mills’ lushly warm production, his contributions adding tasteful textures to the strain of chamber pop and folk melodies, allowing them to punch through when the compositions have some fullness to them and also gives Michelle Zauner’s sweeter vocals to cut through. The sweeping string crescendos to the 2-minute beauty of ‘Orlando in Love’, the rapturous guitars and drums that give ‘Honey Water’ a bombastic scale to its bellowing atmosphere, the lush americana flair of ‘Mega Circuit’ that compliments Michelle’s tender vocals, the sunny tones and the shuffling grooves of ‘Picture Window’ that has enough choppy vocal effects to give the song a haunting dimness, and the liltingly charming duet between Michelle Zauner and Jeff Bridges on ‘Men in Bars’ that’s harmonized with graceful pianos and pedal steel.
But as much as there is beauty and depth that managed to slip through within the half-hour runtime of this album, it also falls pretty short when the lyricism and the compositions are undertuned and underdeveloped, leading to ‘For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)’ to end up in a complicated situation. An album where the melancholic tone it carries is supported with enough writing intricacy and textural warmth, but the decision to step back on richer melodies and wordier writing - even if it’s justifiable, as Michelle Zauner described in interviews leading to the album that the rapturous success from the past few years feels like she’s “getting too close to the sun” - means that the record tends to gesture to those interesting ideas rather than giving it more room to grow. Despite ending up lacking in certain parts, for the most part, it does succeed in opening up the space for the feminine melancholy to be captivated and understood.
Favorite Tracks: ‘Orlando In Love’, ‘Honey Water’, ‘Mega Circuit’, ‘Picture Window’, ‘Men In Bars’ ft. Jeff Bridges
Least Favorite Track: ‘Magic Mountain’