Album Review: Japanese Breakfast, Jubilee

With Jubilee, Japanese Breakfast upend expectations about the kind of music they can create and the feelings they can evoke. The band’s third full-length forgoes the shoe-gaze ambiance of their 2017 record, Soft Sounds from Another Planet. Instead, Jubilee digs through a tightly crafted grabbag of ‘70s disco, electronic pop grooves, and cathartic hooks ready-made to be sung along to this festival season. Some fans may miss the guitar-induced haze of the band’s early material. But they’ll surely appreciate Jubilee as an important stage in the evolution of singer-songwriter and author Michelle Zauner, who displays a startling new ability to bend pop music to her will.

Where Soft Sounds from Another Planet dwelled on atmosphere, Jubilee is concise and economical. This focused mindset is clear from the opening track, “Paprika,” a celebratory anthem set to brass, strings, and a marching band cadence. The band uses these tighter, leaner frameworks as a sandbox to toy with genres and moods they’ve previously left untouched. “Slide Tackle” conjures the feeling of listening to Chic and Talking Heads on a summer’s day, and “Sit” is a churning ballad that toils over a slow burn of washed-out synths. Zauner displays a razor-sharp instinct as a singer who can cut to the essence of many genres, whether she’s evoking Madonna’s swagger on “Be Sweet,” or Neko Case’s storytelling on the epic closer, “Posing For Cars.” If you couldn’t imagine Zauner flirting with EDM or ‘80s new wave, Jubilee should recast any expectations about the lanes that she can move in going forward.

Though the band has found a newfound inspiration in traditional pop structures, Jubilee’s hooks play a subversive role: They serve as a Trojan horse to sneak in Zauner’s poetry. Co-produced by Alex G, “Savage Good Boy” is the most upbeat song you’ve ever heard about a greedy billionaire riding out the apocalypse in a bunker: “And when the city's underwater / I will wine and dine you in the hollows / On a surplus of freeze-dried food,” Zauner sings. (The song gets bonus points for featuring the Soprano’s co-star Michael Imperioli in its music video.) On “Posing in Bondage,” the album’s emotional centerpiece, Zauner uses the imagery of BDSM in an ironic twist to illustrate the joy of monogomy. Zauner’s quarantine collab with Ryan Galloway hinted at the singer’s pop side. But Jubilee introduces her to a class of songwriters like Grimes, Solange, and Phoebe Bridgers who make imaginative pop music with substance.

Listen to Jubilee on Bandcamp and watch the music video for “Savage Good Boy” below.