Japanese Breakfast -- Jubilee: Review

Japanese Breakfast -- Jubilee

[Dead Oceans]

Japanese Breakfast’s Jubilee is an odd kind of rebellious statement. Not the type that naively wears black skinny jeans to math class or the one that ‘fights the system’ by wearing pajama pants to Sunday mass, but the type to counter the attitude of the environment. Jubilee is like a rainbow in a typhoon, an emotionally-subversive album for the indie pop genre, celebrating joy and positivity rather than the genre’s staples of ennui and loneliness.

Joy is a new look for Japanese Breakfast. The band’s first two albums are painfully heavy, covering Michelle Zauner’s confused feelings of anger, sadness, and emptiness in grieving her mother who she lost just before the release of her debut Psychopomp. That album and the second Soft Sounds From Another Planet explore these difficult emotions, and Zauner’s recently published memoir, Crying in H Mart, is a direct extension of the stories told in the first two albums.

While the emotional shift on Jubilee is wonderfully powerful, it’s its expanded instrumentation that sets this album apart from earlier Japanese Breakfast. Unlike the guitar-driven 90s-indie rock of the first two albums, Jubilee is a pinwheel of sounds, mixing blends of new wave, glam rock, slacker, and baroque pop into something completely new.

It starts with “Paprika,” this breath-taking chamber pop opener that continuously builds over glistening strings and a march snare, resonating like a Funeral-era Arcade Fire track. The lyrics grace Zauner’s feelings of rising stardom as she asks herself what it's like for her every action to be tracked from a crowd of strangers. The poetic lyrics combined with the encompassing instrumentation feels as if a Jane Austen book were an indie pop song.

“Be Sweet” is a sugar-coated glam rock track that channels Zauner’s inner Kate Bush. The song is a reverb-struck banger with shuffling hi-hats, wavy guitars, bouncy keys, and Zauner’s brilliant vocal work that makes the track so memorable. “Kokomo, IN” is the track most reminiscent of Zauner’s earlier music, but differs with its sunny aura that elevates its lyrics of lovestruck longing.

“Slide Tackle” is Japanese Breakfast drenched in sophisti-pop, featuring a cornucopia of instruments riding over a trancing beat. The song pairs its DIY composition with self-motivating lyrics on fighting for good mental health to make this “dancing with myself” kind of energy. “Posing With Bondage” is a stripped-back electro R&B song about needing love back in your life. Its ethereal instrumentation plays with disembodied vocals and whirring synths to make a colorful, tumultuous storm of neon lights.

“Savage Good Boy” is certainly my favorite track on Jubilee, channeling this intense want to give in this grotesque character of a husband who wants to hide him and his bride in a bunker just for each other. It scampers over a bouncy indie rock melody with shaggy guitars and skittering percussion to make something both weird and sexy that I just absolutely love.

“In Hell” is the rare moment of outright sadness on Jubilee where Zauner contrasts the warm sounds of this album to her feelings of moving on without her mother. While the song features one of the densest instrumentations on the album, it's the heart-tugging vocals that make the song so transcendent.

“Tactics” is a ballad that competes for the title of most beautiful song on the album between its trudging R&B beat and glimmering melodies. Over its succinct runtime, it builds a beautiful scene that feels like the ending of a Studio Ghibli movie. Fucking beautiful man.

Jubilee feels like a look into the future. What Japanese Breakfast makes here is an indie pop interpretation of past aesthetics, repackaging them into something fresh and exciting. A record is no longer just an ‘indie pop’ record but it's a record with an ‘indie pop’ song… and a ‘new wave’ song.... and an ‘R&B’ song, etc. etc. My point is that while Jubilee isn’t the first album to do something like this, and won’t be the last, it does a damn fine job at being what it is.

8.1/10.