Japanese Breakfast tackles the perils of love and masculinity on For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)

She prefers something profound, mature and, like her early works, depressing. To augment this abstract sadness, the guitar-oriented musical template well known in the indie landscape arrives at her feet, ready to be of use. For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), despite being her first album to be recorded at such a grand studio as Sound City, plays like an open session in the artist’s salon. It forsakes her renowned juxtaposition between intimate and transcendental soundscapes à la Jubilee and Soft Sounds From Another Planet and, in turn, welcomes Zauner’s evocative and complex lyricism.

An avid practitioner of intertextuality, she ploughs through various nooks of American and European literature for stories about the illusions and perils of love. The album title is from John Cheever’s “The Chimera”, a 1951 short story about an unhappy married man on a trip to Italy with a false hope to revive his past affair. “Orlando in Love” draws directly from Matteo Maria Boiardo’s titular epic poem about knights fighting for their love interest. These references, cursory as some may be, are also crucial allegories of our current talking point: toxic masculinity. Orlando drowns during his quest to own the sought-after princess. “Leda”, whose myth centres around Zeus’s sexual abuse with her, croons about dreaming to escape from a totalitarian man.

The weighty bulk of literature on man and his bleak and at times harrowing romances makes lines such as the repetition of “You wait” on “Leda”, “They say only love can change a man but all that changes is me” on “Honey Water”, and “He’s gonna make me suffer the way I should” on “Mega Circuit” hit like a hailstorm on wood shingles. And like every great record, For Melancholy Brunettes fits well in its release’s social sphere. These poignant songs are as relevant as ever in the United States, now equipped with an insatiable leading figure who has become a patron saint of noxious male authority for the impressionables. It’s only a shame that the music, albeit beautifully composed, doesn’t feel as forceful as the subject.

There are traces of the magic of the Laurel Canyon Sound: the folkloric “Little Girls” that nods to Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon, the sweet languidness of “Winter in LA” that recalls the Beach Boys’ Surf's Up. Blake Mills, now a ubiquitous producer, and Zauner make a wonderful pair; the liminal endings of, say, “Orlando in Love” and “Honey Water” succeed in simulating dread. Yet, For Melancholy Brunettes refuses to offer any fully fledged interpretation that adds flavour to the sound from which it borrows, thus at times dulling the songs with rich, thoughtful lyrics (see, for instance, “Leda” and “Magic Mountain”). It feels like a cosplay worn more for emotive textures than as a riotous accompaniment to her captivating words.

Nevertheless, For Melancholy Brunettes is an essential record from Japanese Breakfast. “Here Is Someone” and “Magic Mountain”, the songs that enclose the tracklist that largely tackles masculinity, can be viewed as the band’s ARS Poetica. Since Psychopomp, Japanese Breakfast as a collective have undergone fruitful metamorphoses to the point of “What now?”. If we see that “someone” as their fans, “mountain” as their horde of creativity, those two tracks embody the band’s metaphorical conversations about where they are now as musical artists. Standing on the mountain, they see their acclaimed recording works, and Zauner sings about devoting herself to them, possibly encouraging all dejected women, too, to build their own mountains as shelter against the society of toxic men.