Album Review: Japanese Breakfast, For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women)

“The lure of honey water draws you from my arms so needy”, croons Michelle Zauner on the third track of Japanese Breakfast’s For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women).

In the background, the acoustic guitar strums menacingly like a ticking time bomb, before pianos, synths and everything else crash into each other, forming a powerful maelstrom of noise. It’s the closest thing we’ll get to knowing what falling into Jupiter sounds like.

A couple of songs later, the delicate fingerpicking of ‘Little Girl’ brings us back to Earth. Zauner paints a picture of a father, drunk from gin and pissing in the corner of a hotel suite. He dreams of his daughter, but he’ll never see her again because he’s too self-destructive.

These songs are on the opposite ends of the sonic spectrum, but are united by a theme which permeates the record: men, and the wreckage left by their short-sighted temptations and habits.

Zauner opts to observe rather than condemn. There’s no sugar coating, but she expresses a conflicted sense of empathy for a generation left listless in the absence of healthy role models.

The humanity pours out of ‘Men In Bars’, which features a verse from The Dude himself, Jeff Bridges. Weeping slide guitars frame the crestfallen image of a guy whose goofy lighter tricks and premeditated charm have lost their effect on his gal. He’s humiliated, the relationship crumbles, and both of them end up seeking solace in the same seedy places.

Maybe For Melancholy Brunettes doesn’t pass the Bechdel test, but neither does real life for most people. Gleaming with superb production and songwriting, Japanese Breakfast’s latest is a masterpiece.

• Out now