Latest news with #CryinginHMart
Sydney Morning Herald
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Japanese Breakfast beats Melbourne cold with warm presence and irresistible performance
MUSIC | Rising Festival Japanese Breakfast ★★★★ PICA, June 5 'It's so cold here! What's going on?' says Michelle Zauner, driving force behind indie darlings Japanese Breakfast. Yes, it's cold in Melbourne right now, and especially in PICA, a big empty shed in Port Melbourne with uneven concrete floors and unlit portaloos. Everyone's wearing massive coats and basking in our collective body heat, while cursing our friends at the Jessica Pratt show in the warm, acoustically luxuriant recital hall. But I'm at a Japanese Breakfast show and thrilled about it. It's been eight years since they last visited, and since then they've put out the breakthrough hit album Jubilee and this year's literate, almost baroque For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women), and Zauner has written a bestselling memoir, Crying in H Mart. She writes songs dense with emotion and pathos, and performs them irresistibly. The six-piece opens with three songs from the new album, all dripping with Zauner's great lyrics and the band's rich instrumentation. She's in a frilly shirt and torn tights. Saxophone dances with flute as the lights play with the stage smoke. 'The breeze carries salt / And sipping milky broth / He cast his gaze towards the sea out / The Winnebago,' she sings on Orlando in Love. It's dreamlike. The sound bounces around indie genres. Honey Water leans into shoegaze. Slide Tackle – which she introduces with a cry of 'No more melancholy!' – plays with disco. The guitar finger slide comes out for the country-tinged Men In Bars, with drummer Craig Hendrix sharing the vocals, a part originally performed by Jeff Bridges. Throughout, Zauner's voice is so expressive and full of intent, and her presence is tirelessly warm and breezy. She introduces Winter in LA as being about 'being miserable in lovely places', a contrast that could apply to the whole set. It's not easy to tour to Australia in the '20s. As Zauner tells us, it's so far away and expensive ('IT IS EXPENSIVE!' someone validates from the crowd). But even with high overheads, Zauner wasn't skimping on the massive gong at the back of the stage, used only for the chorus of Paprika in the encore. Correct decision.
The Age
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
Japanese Breakfast beats Melbourne cold with warm presence and irresistible performance
MUSIC | Rising Festival Japanese Breakfast ★★★★ PICA, June 5 'It's so cold here! What's going on?' says Michelle Zauner, driving force behind indie darlings Japanese Breakfast. Yes, it's cold in Melbourne right now, and especially in PICA, a big empty shed in Port Melbourne with uneven concrete floors and unlit portaloos. Everyone's wearing massive coats and basking in our collective body heat, while cursing our friends at the Jessica Pratt show in the warm, acoustically luxuriant recital hall. But I'm at a Japanese Breakfast show and thrilled about it. It's been eight years since they last visited, and since then they've put out the breakthrough hit album Jubilee and this year's literate, almost baroque For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women), and Zauner has written a bestselling memoir, Crying in H Mart. She writes songs dense with emotion and pathos, and performs them irresistibly. The six-piece opens with three songs from the new album, all dripping with Zauner's great lyrics and the band's rich instrumentation. She's in a frilly shirt and torn tights. Saxophone dances with flute as the lights play with the stage smoke. 'The breeze carries salt / And sipping milky broth / He cast his gaze towards the sea out / The Winnebago,' she sings on Orlando in Love. It's dreamlike. The sound bounces around indie genres. Honey Water leans into shoegaze. Slide Tackle – which she introduces with a cry of 'No more melancholy!' – plays with disco. The guitar finger slide comes out for the country-tinged Men In Bars, with drummer Craig Hendrix sharing the vocals, a part originally performed by Jeff Bridges. Throughout, Zauner's voice is so expressive and full of intent, and her presence is tirelessly warm and breezy. She introduces Winter in LA as being about 'being miserable in lovely places', a contrast that could apply to the whole set. It's not easy to tour to Australia in the '20s. As Zauner tells us, it's so far away and expensive ('IT IS EXPENSIVE!' someone validates from the crowd). But even with high overheads, Zauner wasn't skimping on the massive gong at the back of the stage, used only for the chorus of Paprika in the encore. Correct decision.
Gulf Today
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
Michelle Zauner turns to melancholy in her new album
'All of my ghosts are real, all of my ghosts are my home,' Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast sings in her singular way — sweetness laced with sorrow. Four years ago, the release of her Grammy-nominated album 'Jubilee' dovetailed with her bestselling memoir 'Crying in H Mart' — chronicling her love of Korean food and loss of her mother — to produce a season of success. Then came a film adaptation of her memoir, for which she wrote the screenplay. With the Hollywood strikes, though, it came to a grinding halt (and later a full stop, when actor and director Will Sharpe left the project). In the aftermath, Zauner recorded new tracks. She sidestepped the spotlight by moving to Seoul — where she immersed herself in Korean language and culture — the subject of her upcoming second book. Zauner talked to The Associated Press about her fourth studio album, 'For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women).' Out Friday, it's that rare thing: a cerebral yet deeply felt album from an artist with just enough commercial success to secure resources for her still-quite-indie vision. The album cover looks like a very sumptuous painting. It's very memento mori with the skull and flowers — and then there's oysters and a tray of bloody guts. Where did the idea come from? I really loved the idea of being on the album cover, but not showing my face. I was feeling pretty introverted after the years that followed 'Jubilee.' It was a really natural desire to just focus more on the work and less on me as a figure. I had noticed this kind of trope in many paintings of women collapsed over tables, overcome with melancholy. It looks like I'm this collapsed, spoiled prince just with a table full of excess, and still miserable. I dressed the table with little Easter eggs from the album — almost like a still life where every object has some kind of meaning. There is a bowl of guts that is a line from 'Here is Someone,' and there's milky broth and oysters, which are lines on 'Orlando in Love.' There's flowers in a vase, which I mention in 'Winter in LA.' Melancholy is a motif throughout the tracks. It feels like a different flavour or colour of grief than your earlier work. How would you describe the kind of sadness you wanted to capture? At this time in my life and the way that I think about melancholy, it's very intertwined with time and the passage of it. And this desire to get ahead of it and to keep it at bay — and the sort of melancholic reality that it's forever passing. I think of it not so much as like a violent sadness or longing or heartbreak, but kind of this pensive, anticipatory grief about the passage of time. It evokes a specific kind of feeling of being sort of on edge. Or, like, a taut feeling. Most of that dissonance, I think, comes from the chord changes or the progressions. I originally wanted to make a creepy album, and those sorts of changes felt really essential to achieving that kind of eerie sound. You recorded this album, shelved it, went to Korea for a year, came back to New York and are now releasing it. Why did you shelve it for a period of time and what's it like now listening back to the recordings? My last record was also shelved for a year because of COVID, so I'm honestly used to that process now. I've actually found that I really love my records even more with time away from them. There's so much that goes into preparing for an album to come out, from the visuals to mixing and mastering to prepping for the tour that, honestly, that kind of separation is really nice. I'm not someone that's super precious. I have a very clear idea of what I want, and I am someone that is good at knowing when to finish. Associated Press
Forbes
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Japanese Breakfast's New Album Is ‘For Melancholy Brunettes'
Singer, songwriter, musician, director, and author Michelle Zauner is shown performing on stage ... More during a live concert appearance with Japanese Breakfast on May 29, 2022 in Allston, Massachusetts. For years, many Japanese Breakfast fans were only familiar with the band's music fronted by singer Michelle Zauner, and in 2021, Zauner invited readers in to her most personal moments in her New York Times bestselling memoir Crying in H Mart, released just a few weeks before Japanese Breakfast's third album Jubilee. With those two experiences now in the rearview mirror, Zauner has been able to spend the last few years focusing again on music, culminating in the new Japanese Breakfast album For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women), out today. While Jubilee struck a more uplifting tone compared to past albums, For Melancholy Brunettes returns to some of the band's moodier origins. The album's title comes from John Cheever's short story 'The Chimera,' which ended up also inspiring the lead single 'Orlando In Love.' "['The Chimera' is] about a man who's unhappy in his marriage and is fantasizing about all the different women he wants to sleep with, and some of them are melancholy brunettes and some are sad women. I just thought that combination of words was quite funny, and sort of filed it away and ended up using it in the song 'Orlando In Love," Zauner told Stereogum. 'I found it to be sort of romantic and tongue-in-cheek, and it had 'melancholy' in the title which I think is really the kind of thematic throughline through the album." Reflecting on the past few years since the release of Jubilee and Crying in H Mart that inspired the album, Zauner said the new album was informed by a sense of fatigue from her work. "For me, in this record, I was thinking a lot about how much my work life had really consumed me over the past several years," Zauner told NPR. "And I think at the end of the Jubilee cycle, I was really reckoning with how I had kind of disrupted a balance in my life and needed to kind of get back on track to live a happier life." Zauner confessed that her hustle picked up after her mother's death in 2014. "I think especially after my mother passed away, I've felt like I've just been running through life trying to do everything I can because I'm so much more aware of how short it is," she said. She ended up spending last year living in Seoul, growing a stronger connection to her familial home where she was born. "There's a kind of melancholy in looking out at these unlived lives. But it's not a violent longing, it's just kind of a melancholic acceptance."
Telegraph
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Japanese Breakfast considers the incel with dreamy, suffocating pop
Who is writing songs for incels? It's a thought that struck me as I watched the devastating TV drama Adolescence, thinking about that vast but largely invisible body of lonely young men buying into the conspiratorial misogyny of online hate. Then a song snagged my consciousness by American-Korean singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner, who operates as sometime band Japanese Breakfast. Mega Circuit is a shiny California pop rock ballad of youthful ennui and desire. It is sung from the perspective of a young woman watching boys showing off in a car park, shimmering with careless bravado that crumbles up close. 'I'm gonna write my baby a shuffle so good,' Zauner blankly sings, 'or he's gonna make me suffer the way I should.' The singer performs oral sex on her boyfriend and sighs sadly with empathy for 'the soft hearts of young boys so pissed off and jaded.' It is a thorny character study, wrapped in gauzy, melodic dream pop. It seems a very bold choice for a single in an escapist pop environment that tends to avoid the political tensions of our troubled age. The 35-year-old Zauner authored a best-selling 2021 memoir, Crying in H Mart, about the death of her mother. For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is her fourth album. She was Grammy nominated for 2022's Jubilee, a more sonically charged collection, although still underpinned by sadness. Virtuoso Americana guitarist and sometime Bob Dylan collaborator Blake Mills produces, taking Zauner out of her synthy, alt-rock territory into something more California acoustic. It is weirdly damped down, like an impoverished indie cousin of Taylor Swift's Folklore, as if they have taken all the elements of classic Laurel Canyon songcraft and shoved them into a small box with no air. It made me think of Los Angeles after the fire, nursing wounds but carrying on as if nothing has happened. Zauner sings softly and almost inexpressively, and you really have to lean in to pick up the words. It's worth it because her lyrics put her in the top tier of contemporary songwriters. Little Girl is sung from the point of view of a feckless father, drinking in a hotel with a young sex worker, thinking about the daughter who won't speak to him. It takes place adjacent to the same car park where Mega Circuit unfolds, the characters in both songs isolated by failures of perspective. 'Little girl, meant no harm,' sings Zauner's sad old man. Zauner operates in a hinterland familiar to fans of such 1970s greats as Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits and Randy Newman, yet almost entirely absent in the work of her poppier contemporaries. Movie star Jeff Bridges makes a curious guest appearance, duetting on Men In Bars. Practically the personification of laidback LA manhood, there is a compelling mismatch of voices, Bridges's singing high and strained next to Zauner's soft breathiness as they pick over different versions of a breakup story. 'We built this / And even when it breaks apart / It's ours,' they sing. For Melancholy Brunettes is an odd, subtle, suffocating album essaying a complexity and ambiguity you don't often hear in modern pop. Neil McCormick Also out: Greentea Peng, Tell Dem It's Sunny ★★★★☆ South London's Greentea Peng has the potential to be a huge crossover star. Born Aria Wells to Afro-Arabic parents and now aged around 30 (she hasn't cared to reveal her precise date of birth), she makes a pungent, psychedelic form of RnB infused with strong flavours of reggae and trip-hop, backed by a fully instrumented rhythm combo. Multi-pierced and tattooed, a little bit bonkers (think: the UK's answer to Erykah Badu), she's the kind of effortlessly charismatic, zero-damns-given performer who'll slouch onstage late-afternoon at a festival and win everybody's hearts, and whose 'real music' connects with those listeners (okay, then: older folks) who are bewildered by Gen-Z pop's pre-programmed tinniness. On the heels of 2021's debut, Man Made, plus 20-odd singles, EPs and mixtapes, Tell Dem It's Sunny feels like Wells's point of top-flight arrival, crystallising her ideas of spiritual growth and slow-mo beats-driven mysticism into irresistibly relatable songs of transcendence and self-questioning. 'Is it too late for me?' she wonders on third track, One Foot, to an arpeggiating guitar riff reminiscent of Paul Weller's The Changingman. On paean to skin-shedding Green, a descending bassline aptly recalls Tricky's Hell Is Round The Corner. You sense that this young woman, who most refreshingly chooses not to share her every life drama on social media, has considerable demons to purge, but by the key track in the album's latter stages, I AM (Reborn), she has conquered them and she's re-entering the bear pit of contemporary youth culture with her guard up: 'I am not who I was yesterday,' she defiantly reasons, 'so how can you know me?' On the strength of Tell Dem It's Sunny's liltingly exploratory grooves, a world-wide audience will surely start getting acquainted with this maverick icon-in-waiting. Andrew Perry Best New Songs By Poppie Platt The Horrors, The Silence That Remains The standout track for me from the Essex psych-rocker's excellent new album Night Life, which is out today. Characteristically dark, Gothic and brimming with influences from the worlds of shoegaze, psych and Krautrock, it's a solid return to form, elevated both by Faris Badwan's snarling vocals and a menacing bass. Role Model, Sally, When the Wine Runs Out The US indie-pop singer has become TikTok's go-to artist for catchy earworm hooks, and this latest offering continues his knack for penning a killer bridge, as he sings of a lover destined to break his heart: 'Aw, s–t, here we go again / I'm falling headfirst'. We've all been there. Yungblud, Hello Heaven, Hello Don McClean, who? If you thought American Pie was long, listen to Doncaster punk-rocker Yungblud's new track, which clocks in at over nine minutes. It's a shape-shifting, ferocious anthem about getting through the other side of a dark spell, as the 27-year-old vulnerably reflects 'There's a chance I won't see you tomorrow / So I will spend today saying hello'.
