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), 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 favorite 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 Zauner pull 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 2x GRAMMY nominated breakthrough album Jubilee and her bestselling memoir Crying In H Martcatapulted 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 realized 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 “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). “Honey Water” plumbs the quiet rage of a woman married to an unfaithful man, watching him cede again and again to lust like a base insect perpetuating its own demise.
The lure of honey water draws you from my arms so needy
You follow in colonies to sip it from the bank
In rapturous sweet temptation you wade in past the edge and sink in
Insatiable for a nectar drinking til your heart expires
”Men in Bars,” a murder ballad in the vein of “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” sung here as duet with Jeff Bridges, follows a relationship on the verge of a violent end as recollections of a happy courtship are raised wistfully and pitifully in the face of impending doom, infidelity once more ushering in destruction.
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.
But for all the record owes to the romantic imagination, the sensibility of Japanese Breakfast is too thoroughly contemporary to lapse into pastiche. Tracks like “Mega Circuit,” a ferocious minor key shuffle in which we are introduced to a gang of loitering incels, and “Winter in LA,” a tongue in cheek take on the edenic California of the Laurel Canyon era, could only have been written in our time. And for as often as Zauner assumes fictional, often male, often insidious personas on For Melancholy Brunettes, her own subjectivity cannot help but surface. “All of my ghosts are real,” she sings on “Picture Window,” a song that manifests the fear of loving someone so much you presage their loss. It is an anxiety rendered gut wrenchingly acute when one considers Zauner’s own history of grief, the loss of her mother having been a major theme of Japanese Breakfast’s work since Psychopomp and one which persists here albeit faintly, as unsuspected echoes of an irredeemable sadness.
Sadness is indeed 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 labor, and though they run like tonic resolutions through the record’s many episodes, they sound most saliently on its final song, “Magic Mountain,” an engagement with Thomas Mann’s famous novel of the same name. Mann’s book is about a hapless young man, Hans Castorp, who checks in for a brief visit to a tuberculosis sanatorium and finds himself unable to leave for a period of seven years. Zauner reimagines herself as Hans and her artistic body of work as the mountain looming over her. It became a personal song, she says, “about confronting the narcissism that goes into being an artist and deciding I didn’t want it to destroy my potential for having a happy life.” For her, making any work feels like scaling a mountain, but from the perch of For Melancholy Brunettes, she surveys the future. “Bury me beside you,” she sings to her beloved, “In the shadow of my mountain.”
