THE JOY OF JAPANESE BREAKFAST
Michelle Zauner battles trauma with pop elation on an excellent new album
Japanese Breakfast
Jubilee
Dead Oceans
★★★★✰
Michelle zauner is an expert at facing grief with elation. The circumstances of her life surrounding the release of her first two albums as Japanese Breakfast are well-documented: Her debut, Psychopomp, was recorded in the wake of her mother’s death from pancreatic cancer in 2014, and her explorations of trauma and melancholy extended onto its sciencefiction-inspired follow-up, Soft Sounds From Another Planet.
Yet Zauner has always sidestepped any desire to linger within pain, instead catapulting toward the possibility of imaginary futures — and it’s made her one of the most compelling indie-pop artists around.
Jubilee is Japanese Breakfast’s most ecstatic-sounding album to date, although one glance at the lyrics will tell you that Zauner isn’t done excavating the thornier aspects of dependency, devotion, and longing. Lead single “Be Sweet,” written with Jack Tatum of Wild Nothing, evolves the Studio 54 influence of her memorable 2017 song “Machinist,” about love between woman and computer, into Eighties-synth bliss; Zauner turns its pleading hook into a rallying cry: “Be sweet to me, baby/I wanna believe in you/I wanna beliiieeeeeve!”
She echoes the sentiment on “Slide Tackle,” a breezy future-funk track that catches her grappling with PTSD. Opener “Paprika” is euphoria in a bottle, and as good of a distillation as you’ll ever get of why certain musicians risk life and limb to perform onstage. “How’s it feel to stand at the height of your powers/ To captivate every heart?” she asks, before answering her own question in a burst of trumpets: “It’s a rush.”
Zauner continues with the sci-fi narratives she first presented on Soft Sounds and weaves them together with more mundane experiences, and it’s not always easy — or particularly useful — to decipher which is which on each song. “Savage Good
Boy” embodies a billionaire with plans to move his family to an underwater compound, where his wife can continue on with her domestic tasks and birth them children; “Sit” translates oral sex into binary code, and envisions the act of seduction as “a chase sequence on loop.” But while these metaphors carry plenty of creativity and dry humor, Zauner’s writing shines when she proves she doesn’t need them as a crutch. Take “In Hell,” which meticulously chronicles the last days of a loved one’s life in a hospital, set to the kind of jangly indie rock that Zauner grew up with in the Pacific Northwest. It’s in these moments, when her proclamations of feeling are realized in the music itself, that Jubilee is at its best.