Grasping at Joy With Jubilee
Japanese Breakfast’s third album, Jubilee, out June 4th on Dead Oceans
Photo by Peter Ash
“Hell is finding someone to love” sings Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner on her new album Jubilee. I am tearing up on the bus while holding a toaster in my lap. Technically the toaster I had belongs to my ex so I have been toasting bread on a skillet. But someone on one of those “buy nothing” Facebook groups was offering up a toaster, so here I am. It is hard to find someone you feel safe with, to be with someone who is always kind to you. Which is, oftentimes, all Zauner asks, singing “be sweet to me baby!” on the 80s bathed track, “Be Sweet”. On “In Hell” Zauner is brave in a very literal sense, prodding around in the darkness and sitting with the role death has played in her life. When it is not peaceful and quick but drawn out and devastating. She unearths the ugliness of the reality of death. Perhaps it’s superficial of me to hear my breakup reflected in a song about the loss of Zauner’s mother, but perhaps all of us are always experiencing little deaths. Jubilee is a pressure valve released, gushing and emotional. Zauner lives in an abundance of desire and yearning. But her technical abilities are not lost as she orchestrates the album, a tender string section is pulled on “Tactics” and horns blister a la Carly Rae on “Slide Tackle”. The opening track “Paprika” is begging to be seen, frothing over, “oh it’s a rush”. Jubilee is a glorious and successful attempt at finding joy and gripping it with white knuckles. Zauner is the powerhouse we need but don’t deserve and I’d like to crown Jubilee as the album of the summer 2021.
This album is not a meditation but a purge, refusing straightforward pop optimism and instead asking knotty questions with lyrics that sometimes read more as prose. There are those lost in grief, those clinging to joy, and those looking for joy despite grief. Zauner moves in and out of these personas throughout the album. Jubilee makes the history of Japanese Breakfast less of a discography and more of an emotional archive. Bitterness and loss have long been seeds of her artistic success (in her first two albums and in her book Crying in H Mart, both of which grapple with the death of her mother), but she subverses the sad girl stereotype, chiming in the darkness. “Kokomo, IN” is soaked in electronica. Heartfelt, this track tells the story of gooey young lovers saying goodbye. Not a love song or a loss song, but a song about the pureness of emotion. It’s a track you wish someone wrote for you, a story that someone handed you personally. Don’t you wish someone was thinking about you, waiting for you whenever you come back? “Posing in Bondage” brushes against disco. Jubilee isn’t afraid of rushes of synth, it is finally ready to embrace. It takes work to create and sustain joy and my god Zauner works and works and works. Holographic, Jubilee refuses stasis.
There is also frank restraint on Jubilee. Never the wealth-hoarding colonizing man on “Savage Good Boy”, knowing some of us seek out bondage for its stability on “Posing In Bondage”, and lonely on “Posing for Cars”. Zauner is no longer bound by grief, but her more immediate form is sometimes still contained. The alien-voiced “Savage Good Boy” is paired with an immaculate and indulgent music video which climaxes in Zauner taking a vampire bite out of The Sopranos’ Michael Imperioli. In part a cautionary tale, Zauner investigates villainy. She is never one to be kept as a pet or prey. “Slide Tackle'' is grappling with your own mind, wrestling yourself into submission. When Zauner repeats “be good to me”, she isn’t so much asking of others but asking herself. In Jubilee there is a devastating ode to finally shedding the many skins of grief and finding joy on your own terms. Taking the stylish pieces of Soft Sounds From Another Planet and the grit from Psychopomp, there is a fluidity in Jubilee, shifting gloriously between dreamy, electric, and rock god. A culmination of her work falls into the blazing, minutes-long guitar solo on the final track “Posing for Cars”.
“Posing in Cars” is maybe not lonely but what happens when two very different kinds of people still love each other. It’s not alone but missing the reciprocity of intensity. Zauner credits “At Least That's What You Said” by Wilco as an inspiration for the track. I think of my parents back home in Illinois who love Wilco and who call but don’t know how to comfort. How I’d make my ex a playlist every year for their birthday and how each year we’d fight because they didn't understand what I was trying to communicate with guitar solos. Like Zauner I am emerging from grief, finding endurance because of loss and in spite of it. I am at therapy most days, I see my ex for hangouts regularly, I try to call my mother, I text my friends I love them on days when it’s so hot the sky glimmers and wavers. I set my toaster down, clean the countertop of my studio apartment, and light some incense. I will be damned if I do not wring out every minute of sunlight the day allows. I put on Jubilee and grasp for something crushing and kind. And I find one gleaming moment to celebrate.
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