For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) (Frosted Shadow Vinyl) [Vinyl]

Japanese Breakfast 是由美籍韓裔音樂人 Michelle Zauner 主導的音樂單位，以其迷人旋律和深刻情感探索吸引了全球聽眾的注意，上張專輯《Jubilee》更入圍了兩項格萊美提名；Michelle Zauner 不僅以音樂著名，近年來他的回憶錄《Crying in H Mart》也獲得廣泛關注，成為了暢銷書籍，回憶錄講述他與母親的關係以及對韓國文化的反思，
新專輯《For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)》是他首次進入正式錄音室的作品，精緻展現了他獨特的聲音外，也找來了葛萊美獎製作人 Blake Mills 操刀（Alabama Shakes、John Legend、Feist、Jack Johnson），本次作品比起以往更加的內在，探索危險的欲望與衝動，將悲傷與美交織，融合了愛、生命與憂愁，對愛好深度情感流露的人來說，相當值得細細聆聽。

After a decade making the most of improvised recording spaces set in warehouses, trailers and lofts, Japanese Breakfast fourth album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), marks the band first proper studio release. Produced by Grammy Award winner Blake Mills, the record sees front-woman and songwriter Michelle Zauner pull back from the bright extroversion that defined its predecessor Jubilee to examine the darker waves that roil within, the moody, fecund field of melancholy, long held to be the psychic state of poets on the verge of inspiration. The result is an artistic statement of purpose: a mature, intricate, contemplative work that conjures the romantic thrill of a gothic novel.For Melancholy Brunettes follows a transformative period in Zauner life during which her 2x GRAMMY nominated breakthrough album Jubilee and her bestselling memoir Crying In H Mart catapulted her into the cultural mainstream, delivering on her deepest artistic ambitions. Reflecting on that success, Zauner came to appreciate the irony of desire, which so often commingles bliss and doom. "I felt seduced by getting what I always wanted," she says. "I was flying too close to the sun, and I realized if I kept going I was going to die."The plight of Icarus and other such condemned ones lends For Melancholy Brunettes its most persistent theme, the perils of desire. Like light dispersed, its spectral parts take the album characters through cycles of temptation, transgression and retribution. On "Orlando in Love" - a riff on John Cheever riff on Orlando Innamorato, an unfinished epic made up of 68 ½ cantos by the Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo - the hero is a well meaning poet who parks his Winnebago by the sea and falls victim to a siren call, his 69th canto (even in the lofty realm of classical myth Zauner has a soft spot for innuendo). "Honey Water" plumbs the quiet rage of a woman married to an unfaithful man, watching him cede again and again to lust like a base insect perpetuating its own demise.Sadness is indeed the dominant emotional key of this record, but it is sadness of a rarified form: the pensive, prescient sadness of melancholy, in which the recognition of lifes essentially tragic character occurs with sensitivity to its fleeting beauty. Zauner finds space enough inside it for glimmers of hope. They are the consolations of mortals that poets before her have called out to and that poets after will continue to rediscover: love and labor, and though they run like tonic resolutions through the record many episodes, they sound most saliently on its final song, "Magic Mountain," an engagement with Thomas Mann famous novel of the same name. For her, making any work feels like scaling a mountain, but from the perch of For Melancholy Brunettes, she surveys the future.