Spectreview: Japanese Breakfast – Jubilee

Released: June 4, 2021

Alternative/Indie
(Synth-Pop)

-LIGHT CORAL-

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“How’s it feel to stand at the height of your powers
To captivate every heart?
Projеcting your visions to strangers who feel it, who listen, who linger on еvery word?”

Michelle Zauner might be having the best year of any major-indie-tier musician I’m aware of, and deservedly so. 2018’s Soft Sounds from Another Planet, which mixed the cosmic and the mundane in a heavily atmospheric take on indie rock, forecasted bright things for an artist with a seeming mastery over a tried-and-true style. Since then she’s become, in her own words, Jimmy Fallon big. Touring countries, headlining festivals, working the live-streams, popping up on late-night shows, releasing a best-selling memoir whose film rights have now now been picked up by MGM: it’s been a second since I’ve seen a musician’s career pick up momentum at such a rapid pace.

All of that inertia barrels into Japanese Breakfast’s anticipated third record, which has been hyped by music publications since its lead single, “Be Sweet,” dropped last year. There’s that word again, hype: there’s no amount of warnings you can issue that could derail that train, which commonly freights how music is perceived well beyond its release. Jubilee is a great record, but I can’t help but feel it’s been overshadowed by the sudden stratospheric rise of Zauner’s band. It would have to be an unequivocally phenomenal work for it to meet that standard. To these ears, it misses that mark ever so slightly.

Let’s talk first about what this record does well, because that list is honestly substantial. As far as indie goes (and that nebulous genre is set to attain “classic” status in a scant few years) it’s a confident marriage of effusive Eighties-inspired pop and Zauner’s signature moody spaciousness. A lot of this is stuff we’ve seen before from countless other artists, but Zauner finds a niche based on both her unique voice and her ability to land on unconventional melodies. It’s not a straight-ahead pop record considering the few tracks in the middle that break up the momentum, but it’s also not as spacy as Soft Sounds. Instead it finds a peculiar balance between both ends of the spectrum, a middle ground that the best pop-adjacent records often operate in. Combined with the recurrent presence of strings across the record, its dynamic recalls Big Star’s Radio City:, which also saw an act trying on a bunch of acts while mixing the pop with the experimental.

At its best, like on the slinky, sax-led “Slide Tackle” and that aforementioned bubbly lead single, Jubilee feels truly combinative: an awakening of the potential that Zauner hinted at on Soft Sounds and Psychopomp. At other times it feels a little more compensatory, as if she were still finding ways to integrate easier pleasures into her niche; explosive opener “Paprika” feels but a touch overwrought, while the violin ballad “Tactics” is similarly stuffy and the mid-tempo “In Hell” definitely bears its years-old gestation. Those moments pop up less frequently, but there are enough to make Jubilee feel less triumphant than transitional, a step in the direction towards a full artistic arrival.

If this feels like fussing, it’s because there’s so much to enjoy about this record that its shortcomings stick out even more as outliers. This is overall an extremely pleasant, engaging listen whose idiosyncrasies become increasingly comforting the more you dive in. I’ll give you one example: for a hot minute, I believed that Alex G actually did Zauner dirty on “Be Sweet” by over-trebling her voice, but on repeated listens I see their intention in making it soar on the chorus. Same goes for extended closer “Posing for Cars,” which felt indulgent initially but now makes a fittingly melodramatic cap to an expanse of varied emotions. Even those momentum-breaking tracks, including the moody “Posing in Bondage” and “Sit,” have distinct pop angles that make them more than their individual components. It may not be the groundbreaking indie record that it’s been hyped up as, but Jubilee is still a modest step-up for Japanese Breakfast, and that’s enough to get on board.

Recommended for Satoshi Ken films.