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, 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 Mart
catapulted 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.

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. For her, making any work feels like scaling a
mountain, but from the perch of For Melancholy Brunettes, she
surveys the future.

SIDE A
1. Here is Someone
2. Orlando in Love
3. Honey Water
4. Mega Circuit
5. Little Girl

SIDE B
6. Leda
7. Picture Window
8. Men in Bars
9. Winter in LA
10. Magic Mountain