Soft Sounds From Another Planet - Japanese Breakfast (2017)

The Week That Has Been

In case you don’t follow or faithully refresh your browser every morning, I covered a couple of great newer finds this week along with several that I hadn’t heard in a while.

• a hazy underground rap collab from Fly Anakin and Pink Siifu
• Amadou and Mariam, west Africa’s pop power couple
• some obscure orchestral prog rock from Renaissance
• These New Puritans’ ever-evolving exploration of avant garde pop
• pleasant, if lite, jazz from Get The Blessing
• Portugal. The Man and their quest to make pop records that still rock

Japanese Breakfast, but in reverse

Going backwards into the catalog when you get into an artist midstream is always a little bit of a mixed bag.

I hadn’t really gotten into Japanese Breakfast until last year’s For Melancholy Brunettes but I really enjoyed that one and played it quite a bit.

So working backwards makes you kind of watch an artist you admire getting less polished and self-sure, which is kind of an odd journey. Michelle Zauner, the mind behind Japanese Breakfast, has evolved as anyone would over several years, though she’s moving from strength to strength. The earlier albums in her catalog are musically more standard, though no less well-played. Her songwriting is always sharp, with great melodies and lyrics that catch your attention in odd ways.

If the tight, meditative chamber pop of Melancholy Brunettes had been followed up with an echo-laden batch of jangle rock anthems, I would have thought it out of place. So I have to keep in mind that this is precursor, not followup.