‘Soft Sounds From Another Planet’, Japanese Breakfast’s 2017 album
Initially starting as a concept album, Japanese Breakfast transports you into outer space in an attempt to better understand the already-intangible feelings lived on Earth. And while the album does not remedy any earthly enigmas of the homosapiens’ emotional puzzle, traveling into this album’s world makes you want to believe yourself when you say ‘It’s about the journey, not the destination’.
It’s an old album. In fact, it’s not even their latest one, as it was followed by the hit album Jubilee. Yet, like the ‘Boyish’ track, I can’t get it off my mind. Oscillating between disco anthems like ‘Diving Woman’ and ‘Machinist’ and deeply vulnerable ballads like ‘Til Death’ and ‘This House’, their reworking of the shoegaze genre struck in me an unsurprising pretentious temptation to call the album’s vibe somewhat neo-Cocteau-twins-esque. That is what happens when an album deviates from the parameters by which one has learned to classify music, and it is a tremendous delight. It is worth noting the more you know about the band frontwoman’s story, the more you relish the subtleties of her lyrics. Michelle Zauner, a Korean-American from Eugene, Oregon, is also according to The Times Magazine, a "rising literary star" with her best-selling memoir about her mother before her passing, "Crying in H Mart". Mother-daughter love in the context of first-generation immigration is a complicated one, one in which tough love is not a momentary parental measure but a whole language in itself, and Zauner does not shy away from it. Not in her songs, not in her book. “This house is full of women / Playing guitar, cooking breakfast / Sharing trauma, doing dishes / And where are you?” Zauner sings in ‘This House’. Four simple verses: through them, one may have vaguely understood the who, maybe the where, probably not the when; but has most certainly understood the why.
It gets romantic too, in the most endearingly morbid of ways. Rarely does a song that ends with shouting “PTSD, anxiety, genetic disease / Thanatophobia” makes me want to fall in love. But alas, it did. Reminding me of Phoebe Briddger’s ‘Killer’, they both somehow masterfully manage to incorporate death motifs into the most heartwrenching love songs.
There is not much moving to another planet can explain about our feelings: why we yearn for even the toughest of loves, why we seek to forgive those who don’t even care if we do, why we sprint to imagine ourselves dying when we are in love; there is not much our own planet can explain about them for that matter. Lucky for us, Japanese Breakfast offers solace while we do all we can really do: sit in sadness. And as we overthinkers know, sitting in sadness is always more fun when there’s a soft sound playing in the back.
