Japanese Breakfast - For Melancholy Brunettes ( & Sad Women ) - Frosted Shadow - VINYL LP

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 . Produced by Grammy Award winner Blake Mills, the record sees front-woman and songwriter Michelle Zauner pull back from the bright extroversion that defined it's 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. InchI felt seduced by getting what I always wanted,Inch she says. InchI was flying too close to the sun, and I realized if I kept going I was going to die.InchThe plight of Icarus and other such condemned ones lends For Melancholy Brunettes it's most persistent theme, the perils of desire. Like light dispersed, it's spectral parts take the album's characters through cycles of temptation, transgression and retribution. On InchOrlando in LoveInch - 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). InchHoney WaterInch plum

Album Tracks 1. Wasted 2. Knockout 3. Half My Life 4. In the Hollows 5. End of the Night 6. Cosmos Pose 7. Sharpshooter 8. Bored to Death 9. Good Day to Die

Japanese Breakfast's 'Soft Sounds From Another Planet' is less of a concept album about space exploration so much as it is a mood board come to life. Over the course of 12 tracks, Michelle Zauner explores a sonic landscape of her own design, one that's big enough to contain her influences. There are songs on this album that recall the pathos of Roy Orbison's ballads, while others could soundtrack a cinematic drive down one of Blade Runner's endless skyways. Zauner's voice is capacious; one moment she's serenading the past, the next she's robotically narrating a love story over sleek monochrome, her lyrics more pointed and personal than ever before. While 'Psychopomp' was a genre-spanning introduction to Japanese Breakfast, this visionary sophomore album launches the project to new heights.