For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women)
by Japanese Breakfast
Trying to bring into focus Korea-born, Oregon-raised Michelle Zauner – the 35-year-old author and singer-songwriter of the band Japanese Breakfast – is like being given a kaleidoscope instead of a magnifying glass.
The colourful image breaks up into changing patterns, each different, although made of the same elements.
Zauner’s 2021 memoir Crying in H Mart spent more than a year on The New York Times bestseller list, and she’s had essays published in Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour and The New Yorker.
She directs videos for Japanese Breakfast and others. The band’s previous Jubilee (2021) was Grammy-nominated in the best alternative music category and this new album was shaped with producer Blake Mills (Alabama Shakes, John Legend, Laura Marling among his credits) in California’s Sound City. This is where everything from Neil Young’s After the Goldrush to Nirvana’s Nevermind were recorded.
With thoughtful songs referencing 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 Bars with Jeff “The Dude” Bridges), For Melancholy Brunettes is some distance from the occasionally morose indie rock of Japanese Breakfast’s 2016 debut Psychopomp and the embellished pop and dancebeats of Jubilee.
Zauner here is sometimes a whisper away from a languid bossa shuffle, offers string-dappled baroque-pop on Winter in LA and the four-minute Honey Water has such an incessant swirling chug it feels like a Bowie-in-Berlin epic.
Exotic instruments (sarod, gamelan, celesta) sitting alongside synths and saxophone make for discrete songs which step past guitar-framed indie-rock into a quieter, considered and adult take on life.
If Japanese Breakfast – who play Auckland in June – have been off your radar, this is the accessible introduction to the kaleidoscopic career of Michelle Zauner.
Halo on the Inside
by Circuit des Yeux
Circuit des Yeux is 37-year-old Chicago-based electro-rock practitioner and multimedia artist Haley Fohr. With a four-octave range, she shifts from the commanding baritone speak-sing of the late Nico to the falsetto sweep of Anohni by way of Bauhaus and a less histrionic Diamanda Galás.
She’s quite something.
Produced with Andrew Broder (Lambchop, Bon Iver), Halo on the Inside dishes up soaring Teutonic electropop of claustrophobic intensity (Canopy of Eden, with the repeated “I can make a radio break”) and clattering minimalist Goth gloom on the increasingly disruptive sound of layered vocals and percussion on Truth: “Truth is just imagination of the mind.”
The whispered unease of Cathexis is buffeted by winds of synths.
At the end of this shadowland journey of dramatic music and sonorous vocals, Fohr concludes with the restful sonic wash of It Takes My Pain Away.
However, it’s an uneasy journey getting there from the opener Megaloner, where she sings, “All the things you might be are inside of me.”
That might be a bit of a stretch, but there’s something magnetic about Fohr’s commanding, gender-denying operatic range. Beguiling, but not for the faint-hearted.
Japanese Breakfast and Circuit des Yeux albums are available digitally, on CD and vinyl. Japanese Breakfast also on cassette. Japanese Breakfast: Auckland Town Hall, June 7.
