Skip to content
Japanese Breakfast - For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women)
Original price
£0
Original price
£22.99
-
Original price
£25.99
Original price
Current price
£25.99
£22.99
-
£25.99
Current price
£25.99
Warehouse - Available
67 Commercial Way Woking, England GU21 6HN
+441483808586
Track Listing / Description
A1 Here is Someone
A2 Orlando in Love
A3 Honey Water
A4 Mega Circuit
A5 Little Girl
B1 Leda
B2 Picture Window
B3 Men in Bars
B4 Winter in LA
B5 Magic Mountain
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.