Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner likes to describe her festival shows as dating, where she shows off the best, brightest side of herself. Headline shows are more like long-term relationships; more time with the audience means she can reveal more parts of her personality. At Roundhouse tonight she’s practically ready to move in together.
Which isn’t to say that her festival shows are one-dimensional — she’s mastered the art of burying personal trauma inside even her bounciest melodies. But over the space of 75 minutes, Zauner digs so deep into her catalogue that we even get three minutes of ethereal beauty from her soundtrack to the video game Sable. And she opens the encore with a song so new it’s never been played in public before.
Called Mega Circuit, it’s a raw, almost despairing ballad (standout lines: “He wants to make me suffer the way I should” and “So pissed off and jaded”) performed on only acoustic guitar and piano. Sonically at least, it’s a galaxy removed from the bright, glossy, sometimes outrightly joyful music Zauner and her band have played tonight. (After all, how sad can a song sound if it’s got not one but two of those glorious ’80s pop sax solos? Or a gong?)
Zauner expertly brings the show’s two sonic extremes together on the next song, Slide Tackle. Focused and immediate on her latest album, Jubilee, tonight it gets a more extravagant arrangement. Zauner and her husband Peter Bradley start things off quietly and intimately on guitar before the rest of the band (including a violinist and that saxophone player) walk back on stage and join in, creating something even more celebratory than the studio version. And just when it looks like there’s nowhere left to go, Zauner steps up with a guitar solo that’s epic, spacey, and her most impressive of the night.
Only building on that epic scale is the night’s final song, Diving Woman, which alternates between light and dark (with lighting to match) before settling into an hypnotic groove and ultimately an instrumental wigout big on sawing violin, sax blasts, and jagged guitars. It’s almost a world away from the dayglo giddiness of show opener Paprika (as characterised by a bouncing Zauner gleefully bashing that gong throughout).
But that’s because, as a songwriter, producer, author, and now screenwriter, the Japanese Breakfast mastermind knows a thing or two about crafting a narrative arc. The setlist flows like a story, alternating the brighter later material (glittering Be Sweet, the lyrically ominous but musically boppy Savage Good Boy, the ‘70s California dreamin’ Kokomo, IN) with those songs written in the aftermath of her mother’s death in 2014 (the angular vocal and guitar of Everybody Wants To Love You, the dark retro electropop of The Woman That Loves You, the shoegaze of In Heaven).
The result is not unlike that long-term relationship Zauner herself describes: nuanced, enriching, and totally worth the emotional investment.
Japanese Breakfast
Roundhouse, London
27th June 2023
Photo: Paul Grace
- This article originally appeared on Louder Than War.
Nils van der Linden 