In both its musical and visual identity, Michelle Zauner took the baroque-pop influences behind her latest album quite seriously. Days before announcing “For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)”, she posted a selection of paintings of women looking melancholic before revealing the memento mori-inspired cover of her fourth album, picturing her passed out on a table. She liked the idea of being on the cover without having her face featured, she told Vault Magazine, elaborating: “I wanted it to feel like a painting or still life and then have the set design and props all correspond to a symbolic meaning. There’s obviously the skull, which is memento mori; I think a lot of this record is kind of about contemplating mortality. There are oysters, which are a nod to the Venus in a Shell in “Orlando in Love”, and honey water and a milky broth, both track titles.
There is a bowl of guts, which I referenced in “Here is Someone“, and there’s a vase of flowers, which I referenced in “Winter in LA“. So, all the objects on the table are nods to different lyrics. I wanted to emulate these myths or presuppositions of what certain things are supposed to stand for in still-life paintings. I also think it can be interpreted that there’s just a wealth of goods in front of me, and somehow, it’s still overwhelming and exhausting.”
After a decade making the most of improvised recording spaces set in warehouses, trailers and lofts, Japanese Breakfast’s fourth album, “For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)”, marks the band’s first proper studio release.
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.
The Fat Angel Sings 