Graham Reid | | 1 min read
Winter in LA
Korea-born, Oregon-raised 35-year old Michelle Zauner is one of those artists who has something to say and more than one way of saying it.
She may be the singer-songwriter of the band Japanese Breakfast but her life was of such interest that her 2021 memoir Crying in H Mart spent more than a year on The New York Times best-seller list.
It explored, sometimes through food, what it meant to grow up mixed race, trying to find her own identity, losing her mother to cancer and more.
It was one of Barak Obama's favourite books of that year.
She has also had essays published in Harper's Bazaar, Glamour and The New Yorker, some spun off from her memoir.
She directs videos for Japanese Breakfast and others.
It took a couple of albums for Japanese Breakfast to find their niche (the 2013 debut June was a collection of miniatures, most barely over a minute long) but Jubilee (2021) was nominated for a Grammy in Best Alternative Music Album category.
This new album was shaped with producer Blake Mills (Alabama Shakes, John Legend, Laura Marling among his credits) in California's Sound City where everything from Neil Young's After the Goldrush to Nirvana's Nevermind were recorded.
With thoughtful songs which reference the goddess Venus as a seductive siren (Orlando in Love), “incel eunuchs” (the explicit Mega Circuit) and bad relationship decisions (the country ballad Men in Bar with Jeff “The Dude” Bridges), For Melancholy Brunettes is some distance from the morose indie rock of Japanese Breakfast's 2016 debut Psychopomp and the more embellished pop and dancebeats of 2021's upbeat Jubilee.
Zauner here is sometimes a whisper away from a languid bossa shuffle, offers up string-dappled baroque-pop on Winter in LA and the four minute Honey Water has such an incessant swirling chug it feels like an epic.
Exotic instruments (sarod, gamelan, celeste) sitting alongside synths and saxophone make for discrete songs which step past guitar-framed indie.rock to offer a considered, quieter and adult take on life.
If Japanese Breakfast have been off your radar this is the accessible introduction to the kaleidoscopic career of Michelle Zauner.
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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here
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