Review: Japanese Breakfast: Not Sad, Just Brilliant

It would be too easy to shunt indie-pop idea-machine Japanese Breakfast’s records into categories — here’s the sad one, the science fiction one, the happy one — especially given the title of her latest, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women). It’s spelled out in the title, right? Not quite. Michelle Zauner is too canny (and talented) to be pigeon-holed. Her fourth record may thrum with melancholy, but it’s way more than just “sad girl music.”

Zauner made a name for herself with 2016’s equally bleak and bouncy Psychopomp, from there cementing her ability to lend her crystalline lyrics and lush melodies to everything from vehicular sex acts (2017’s sultry “Road Head”) to greed in the age of the manosphere (the lush “Savage Good Boy,” from her excellent 2021 album Jubilee). For Melancholy Brunettes is an evolution of everything that came before — mixing and merging imagery both mythic and mundane with A-class instrumentation from the likes of Bob Dylan guitarist Blake Mills (who produced the record), legendary session drummer Jim Keltner, and on one track, vocals from actor Jeff Bridges.

Over the course of 10 songs, Zauner grapples with the fickle nature of the muse — whether you’re a long-ago poet or a small-town strummer. See “Orlando in Love,” a Greek legend of a track with silky, old-movie strings and playful percussion that tells the tale of the titular poet and the sirens that drag him down in the end: “Singing his name with all the sweetness of a mother/Leaving him breathless and then drowned.” And then there’s “Mega Circuit,” a country-tinged, yet ominous tune about ATV-riding “incel eunuchs” and the women who yearn to “write my baby/A shuffle good.”

Romance is a double-edged sword here — on the delicate “Leda,” which hums with death and destruction when you recall that the titular heroine was raped by Zeus in swan form — and on “Winter in L.A.,” a sweet and swinging track about wishing to be the kind of girl who loves the sun. With love and loss, inspiration and indignation, For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) is a folk tale, a small-town barroom yarn, a gothic novel, and a ghost story. Don’t even try to pin her down.