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Japanese Breakfast: For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) review – a bit too tasteful
Michelle Zauner addresses big themes on her band’s fourth album, but her sharp writing isn’t best served by wistful arrangements
Now probably more famous as the author of Crying in H Mart, her bestselling 2021 memoir about food, identity and grief, Michelle Zauner ’s fourth album as Japanese Breakfast feels simultaneously assured and a little unsatisfying. In response to the Korean American’s last outing, 2021’s bouncier, electronic-leaning Jubilee, For Melancholy Brunettes… features mid-tempo indie rock warmed by vintage organs, the sigh of steel guitar and other trappings of wistful Americana. But on a record teeming with big themes – flawed humanity, Greek myth and the brevity of life; one regularly stacked with great lines (“Pissing in the corner of a hotel suite, do you always remember where you are?”, from the excellent Little Girl), all this mellow prettiness doesn’t really do Zauner’s best writing justice.
Or read this on The Guardian
