Latest news with #MegaCircuit
Forbes
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Japanese Breakfast Performs An Intimate ‘Melancholy' Recital In N.Y.C.
Japanese Breakfast at El Museo del Barrio on March 22, 2025. Japanese Breakfast, the acclaimed indie pop group led by singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner, did something out of the ordinary this week to promote their record For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), which came out on Friday: they announced an impromptu special show at New York City's El Museo del Barrio that would consist of mostly unplugged versions of the new album's songs and old favorites. 'Unlike the boisterous Jubilee,' Zauner wrote in the concert's playbill, referring to the group's last album from 2021, 'For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is quite delicate. It is our first album, I think, that has the ability to hold its own in a stripped down format as well as in its full production. As we've pared down the arrangements for this evening, I wanted the stage design to foreshadow our upcoming tour production in a similarly stripped down fashion, as if it were a grade school recital." Japanese Breakfast at El Museo del Barrio on March 22, 2025. In front of a packed audience, Saturday's concert at El Museo – a Halem-based museum devoted to Latino culture and art – certainly lived up to Zauner's vision. The intimate show featured only Zauner (in dress and makeup like an 18th- or 19th-century European character, similar to the one in the 'Orlando in Love' video), guitarist Peter Bradley and keyboardist Craig Hendrix accompanied by a three-piece string section performing all of For Melancholy Brunettes' exquisite songs – whose lyrics touch on the Icarus theme of those who fly too close to the sun. Japanese Breakfast at El Museo del Barrio on March 22, 2025. Even without the elaborate Romantic-leaning production and arrangements as heard on the new album, the unplugged arrangements of the songs during the show don't take away from their beauty and lyrical depth; rather they become more revealed from the charm of 'Orlando in Love' and 'Mega Circuit' to the dreamy 'Men in Bars' and 'Winter in L.A.' Zauner's spoken-word introduction to 'Leda,' in which shared its background story drawing from a period of estrangement from her father, was one of several poignant moments from the show. Following the performance of the entire For Melancholy Brunettes album in the first two acts of the 'recital,' Zauner and her band performed a few older songs for the final act–including new takes of the buoyant 'Be Sweet' (which was a noticeable departure from its original synthpop incarnation), 'Kokomo, IN' and 'This House,' the penultimate track from Japanese Breakfast's 2017 second album Soft Sounds from Another Planet. Japanese Breakfast at El Museo del Barrio on March 22, 2025. Unsurprisingly, Japanese Breakfast received rousing applause at the end of this approximately one-hour show. It was a promising taste of what's to come from the band's tour, which is scheduled to kick off on April 12 at Coachella in Indio, California. Setlist: Act 1 Here Is Someone Orlando in Love Mega Circuit Honey Water Little Girl Leda Act 2 Picture Window Men in Bars Winter in L.A. Magic Mountain Act 3 Kokomo, IN Boyish Lindsey Be Sweet This House
Yahoo
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Japanese Breakfast Play Tug of War With Time in ‘Picture Window' Video
Michelle Zauner turned a lifelong rumination on loss into a cinematic capsule in Japanese Breakfast's 'Picture Window' music video. 'I wanted this video to feel like a short film,' the musician shared about the visual, which stars Omega from Balming Tiger and Gyuri Kim. Filmed while Zauner, who directed the video, was living in Seoul last year, 'Picture Window' follows the pair as they play tug of war with the passage of time. 'Ever since I was a young girl I've dealt with intrusive thoughts of loved ones dying horrible deaths,' Zauner said in a statement. 'When someone is running late or they've neglected a text or even if they're just looking over a balcony, my mind has a tendency to run to the worst case scenario, a reflex only exacerbated by my experience of many real deaths. It can be both a relief and a struggle to love someone who doesn't share this same proclivity for anxiety. Picture Window explores that dynamic.' More from Rolling Stone Japanese Breakfast: Not Sad, Just Brilliant Japanese Breakfast's Michelle Zauner Says Her Film Went 'Down the Drain' After Director Pulled Out Japanese Breakfast Drop Sublime New Single 'Mega Circuit' - and Ride Around on ATVs The video cuts between scenes that are soaked in cold blue hues and others that are hyper-realistic, where the couple runs through city streets and frolic through parks. Zauner was drawn to Omega's energy and charm when casting him in the role, but it was Kim's 'melancholy and uncertainty,' she says, that made them a perfect match. 'Watching it back, it's bittersweet to look back on my year abroad—the wonderful people I met, the neighborhoods I loved and lived in,' Zauner said. 'The constant tracking from left to right is a reminder of how time continues to pass no matter how forcefully you struggle to beat it back or rush to get ahead of it. I watch out the window as the scenery passes, visualizing all my unlived lives swishing past.' 'Picture Window' appears on the recently-released Japanese Breakfast album For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), their first since 2021's Jubilee. Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
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'.
The Independent
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Japanese Breakfast's soothing album For Melancholy Brunettes (and Sad Women) lacks the piquant flavours of her prose
Michelle Zauner's fourth indie-pop album as Japanese Breakfast might be titled For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), but it paints stronger portraits of hideous men. The Korean-American artist introduces us to a guy who is 'plotting blood with your incel eunuchs' and 'gonna make me suffer the way I should' on 'Mega Circuit'; to a lost world of 'Men in Bars'; to a cheater ('Honey Water') and an alcoholic with a 'special way of ruining the mood' ('Leda'). In each song, the singer assumes a submissive persona, her sweet, breathy voice carried on muddy currents of lo-fi grunge and trapped with these unappealing guys in a kind of sonic Stockholm syndrome. 'Sucked you off by the AC unit,' she croons, equal parts beguiling and bored, 'I could be the home you need.' It's a shift back to the dark side for Zauner. Her first two albums, 2016's Psychopomp and 2017's Soft Sounds from Another Planet, channelled the grief she felt in the wake of her mother's death from pancreatic cancer. Her golden-toned 2021 record Jubilee, meanwhile, was an attempt to capture joy as her brilliant, New York Times bestselling memoir, Crying in H Mart, soaked up all the sorrow. I loved the book's raw, original evocation of a stubborn only child's difficult relationship with a strict single mother and the bittersweet insight Zauner gave into her relationship with Korean culture. It's just a shame the music doesn't possess the umami flavours of her prose. After opening with the rotating twinkle of a boot sale music box, it jogs pleasantly through phases of mellow grunge with countrified guitar jangle, drums and arcing piano. I leaned right into the Mongolian pony trot strum and east Asian semi-tone strings of 'Orlando in Love', and The Mamas & the Papas-indebted twang and tambourine of 'Winter in LA'. But the whole thing can float by like Portland coffee shop background noise. In interviews about this album – all of which I found more piquant than the record itself – Zauner spoke about her literary inspiration. Her title comes from a 1951 John Cheever story called 'The Chimera', about an unhappily married man attempting to rekindle a doomed affair. She said she was tapping into the Gothic spirit of proto-feminist authors such as the Brontes and Mary Shelley in her attempt to stitch new life from the gory parts of her pain. She's also spoken about listening to a lot of Björk and Kate Bush: women who stretched their weirdness into wild shapes in the studio. So why is Zauner playing it so safe? She's a terrific storyteller with the potential to really push her troubling tales into fresh audio spaces. Interestingly, she told Marie Claire she's 'never really identified as a singer'. Her soothing voice, though very lovely, doesn't always sell the cleverness of her lyrics. I imagine some of the foul men she's sending up might even play this record and enjoy such demure aural therapy without realising that they're the ones she's skewering. Of course, that sly stealth will be part of the appeal for some. I've been playing the record for days and feel soothed by its featherlike finger-picking, warm recorders and earthy cellos. The closing track, 'Magic Mountain', certainly sounds like it was made by people who listened to a lot of Nick Drake – never a bad thing. It also offers hope. After all the toxic masculinity her characters have handled, Zauner hopes for 'a new man, a new man' while keeping her late mother's X-ray in a locket. Peace, at last.
