Japanese Breakfast
Roundhouse, London
twenty seventh June 2023

Japanese Breakfast’s good Roundhouse present is the musical equal of a long-term relationship: nuanced, enriching, and completely well worth the emotional funding.

Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner likes to explain her competition reveals as relationship, the place she reveals off the most effective, brightest facet of herself. Headline reveals are extra like long-term relationships; extra time with the viewers means she will be able to reveal extra components of her persona. At Roundhouse tonight she’s virtually prepared to maneuver in collectively. Which isn’t to say that her competition reveals are one-dimensional — she’s mastered the artwork of burying private trauma inside even her bounciest melodies. However over the house of 75 minutes, Zauner digs so deep into her catalogue that we even get three minutes of ethereal magnificence from her soundtrack to the online game Sable. And she or he opens the encore with a music so new it’s by no means been performed in public earlier than.

Known as Mega Circuit, it’s a uncooked, nearly despairing ballad (standout strains: “He needs to make me endure the best way I ought to” and “So pissed off and jaded”) carried out on solely acoustic guitar and piano. Sonically not less than, it’s a galaxy faraway from the intense, shiny, typically outrightly joyful music Zauner and her band have performed tonight. (In any case, how unhappy can a music sound if it’s obtained not one however two of these superb ’80s pop sax solos? Or a gong?)

Zauner expertly brings the present’s two sonic extremes collectively on the subsequent music, Slide Deal with. Centered and rapid on her newest album, Jubilee, tonight it will get a extra extravagant association. Zauner and her husband Peter Bradley begin issues off quietly and intimately on guitar earlier than the remainder of the band (together with a violinist and that saxophone participant) stroll again on stage and take part, creating one thing much more celebratory than the studio model. And simply when it appears like there’s nowhere left to go, Zauner steps up with a guitar solo that’s epic, spacey, and her most spectacular of the evening.

Solely constructing on that epic scale is the evening’s remaining music, Diving Lady, which alternates between gentle and darkish (with lighting to match) earlier than settling into an hypnotic groove and in the end an instrumental wigout massive on sawing violin, sax blasts, and jagged guitars. It’s nearly a world away from the dayglo giddiness of present opener Paprika (as characterised by a bouncing Zauner gleefully bashing that gong all through).

However that’s as a result of, as a songwriter, producer, writer, and now screenwriter, the Japanese Breakfast mastermind is aware of a factor or two about crafting a story arc. The setlist flows like a narrative, alternating the brighter later materials (glittering Be Candy, the lyrically ominous however musically boppy Savage Good Boy, the ‘70s California dreamin’ Kokomo, IN) with these songs written within the aftermath of her mom’s demise in 2014 (the angular vocal and guitar of Everyone Desires To Love You, the darkish retro electropop of The Lady That Loves You, the shoegaze of In Heaven).

The end result isn’t not like that long-term relationship Zauner herself describes: nuanced, enriching, and completely well worth the emotional funding

You will discover Japanese Breakfast on their web site in addition to Fb, Instagram, and Twitter.

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Phrases by Nils van der Linden. You possibly can go to his writer profile for Louder Than Warfare right here. He tweets as @nilsvdlinden and his web site is right here. He hosts the weekly Temper Swings present on Louder Than Warfare Radio.

All photographs © Paul Grace. For extra of Paul’s writing and photographs go to his archive. Paul is on Fb, Twitter, Instagram and his web sites are www.paulgrace-eventphotos.co.uk & www.pgrace.co.uk.