Michelle Zauner’s first album as Japanese Breakfast, 2016’s Psychopomp, was a meditation on grief in the wake of her mother’s death from cancer, as well as a raw portrayal of sexuality and heartache. That these subjects could coexist in the same space isn’t unusual (death and sex often mix, especially at the edge of human experience), but Zauner’s gift for connecting specific details to simple metaphor was uniquely affecting. “The dog’s confused/She just paces ‘round all day/She’s sniffing at your empty room,” she sang on “In Heaven.” Then, on “Jane Cum”: “Soulless animal keep feeding on my meat/All my tiny bones between your teeth.”
While Psychopomp focused on the most intimate human experiences, her new album, Soft Sounds From Another Planet, uses big guitars and melancholic arrangements to address life on Earth, but it calls upon the cosmos for its perspective. Zauner has said that Soft Sounds... began as a concept album—“a science fiction musical”—but the idea never panned out. Still, there’s a sheen to the project that suggests the initial inspiration made it into the album’s production (there are wordless, atmospheric interludes), as well as numerous references to other worlds.
“Machinist,” the first single, is the biggest leap forward in terms of sound and one of the album’s best songs. The song begins with the voice of a woman speaking to a computer: “Was it always this way and I just couldn’t see it?,” she asks, falling for her digital lover. Then, in a whirl of keyboards and Auto-Tune, the track explodes as a kind of new age disco anthem. “I just wanted it all,” she sings.
On the title track, Zauner looks to the heavens for help with a self-destructive partner. “I wish I could keep you from abusing yourself for no reason at all,” she sings. Though Zauner searches to other worlds for help, the only answer she gets is reverb. (I'm reminded of a Calvin & Hobbes strips when Calvin screams to the abyss.) On “Boyish,” an old song repurposed from her days in the rock band Little Big League, Zauner brings things back down to earth. “I can’t get you off my mind, I can’t get you off in general,” goes the instantly iconic chorus, now backed by a melody that would make Roy Orbison grin. The sentiment encapsulates Zauner’s sensibilities: uncomfortably personal, unpretentiously profound.
Nowhere has Zauner’s approach ever been clearer than when the band opened for the newly-reunited Slowdive earlier this year. It was a pairing that at once justified early comparisons between Japanese Breakfast and shoegaze greats, but also inadvertently highlighted the differences between the two groups. Where Slowdive set their vocals back in the mix, their voices just another thread in a tapestry of sound, that is not Zauner’s way. Instead, Zauner and co-producer Craig Hendrix make sure the words are never lost in the mix, but rather driving it. As much as shoegaze and C86 bands, Zauner’s music evokes the Pacific Northwest indie rock that Zauner grew up with in Oregon before moving to Philly; “Road Head” rings with the strip-mall mythologizing of Built to Spill’s “Car,” and there’s a hint of Modest Mouse’s “Sleepwalking” on torch songs like “Boyish.”
As with Psychopomp, the album’s most powerful moments come when Zauner examines seeming contradictions that actually aren’t or shouldn’t be. The opening track, “Diving Woman,” flirts with domesticity as a way to normalize her life. “I want to be a woman of regimen,” she sings, “A bride in her home state/A diving woman of Jeju-do.” Jeju is an island in Zauner’s native South Korea with a traditionally matriarchal society, where female free divers were the breadwinners and heads of household. Here, Zauner has reimagined an age-old trope on her own terms. For the album, she told Out, “I create my own experiences and communities that are largely rooted with queer people, women, non-binary people, all different races.”
With “The Body Is a Blade,” Zauner’s fascination with duality comes across most pointedly. “The body is a blade that moves while your brain is writhing/Knuckled under pain, you mourn but your blood is flowing,” she sings. Though Zauner is still grieving, her body has its own ideas. And even as Japanese Breakfast turn to the stars, Zauner’s best moments are rooted in the here and now.
