Jubilee (2021) – Japanese Breakfast

Dead Oceans, 2021

As the name suggests, Jubilee is a celebration for Japanese Breakfast—a celebration of joy and love. Japanese Breakfast’s third record is a sweet, complex, and skillfully produced piece of alt-pop. The record has an overarching retro synth-pop sound, but each track is differentiated by specific production and instrumentation elements that keep the record from being stale.

Michelle Zauner has stated that she wanted to make an album about joy after the first two Japanese Breakfast albums were heavy with the weight of grief. What does joy sound like though? On Jubilee, joy comes in the form of sax solos, band horns, slide guitars, orchestral arrangements, and brilliant guitar solos. Add to that, intimate and vulnerable songwriting about love, and you have the flexible sound of joy.

The opener, “Paprika”, instantly starts off with energy. We get parading horns that create an atmosphere of fanfare for the song. The lyrics of dreams and magic on top paint a picture of a fantasy world and if you close your eyes you might even be there.

“Kokomo, IN” is a cute and sweet song about waiting for a lover to return. The slide guitar here is wonderful and creates an island aesthetic fit for the other Kokomo in Hawaii. I think the slide guitar riffs and violin-based melody add a defining layer to the track. They take the track to another level that it couldn’t have reached without them.

Song defining instrumentation is continued on the next track “Slide Tackle”. This nighttime pop track is quite straightforward, but the sax solo totally makes the song. The parts around the sax moments are quite monotone—especially the drumbeat. As tied to jazz as the saxophone is, the sax bits on “Slide Tackle” add a much needed free flowing element to an otherwise overly rigid track.

The tracks “Savage Good Boy” and “Posing For Cars” have guitar solos that simply shine. On the former, the closing guitar solo basically sings the song out to bring the very upbeat and quirky track to an end. The song overall is just so odd and peculiar. On the latter, the album ends with a grand and magnificent guitar solo that simply rocks. It’s like a 2021 mountainous and less problematic version of the “Piano Exit” on “Layla” with a touch of John Mayer’s “Gravity”.

Contrasting with the tracks that have singular elements of instrumentation that shine, there are a couple points on Jubilee where there’s too much instrumentation and overproduction.

“Savage Good Boy” has electric guitar, bass, and synths playing similar chords and notes all throughout the track. Mixed together, it creates a droning white noise that’s quite distracting from Zauner’s vocals. Also, that vocal distortion at the beginning is… weird?

“Sit” also has droning and reverby guitars like “Savage Good Boy”, but they’re not as bad. I get the effect Zauner wanted to create and it’s pretty cool, but it ultimately does drown out the vocals. The synths on top of the guitar create a really nice melody. I just wish the guitars were turned down a notch. I like this 80’s synth pop type track, though it makes for better background music than a focused listen.

The first two singles “Be Sweet” and “Posing In Bondage” are very lovely and intimate tracks. Both are written as songs directed at a single person. “Be Sweet” has a lot going on in the production. It’s quite busy with guitars, synths, keys, and a standout bassline, but unlike some of the other tracks on the record, it isn’t overwhelming. The production is there to set a foundation for the vocals to flourish as it should in any good pop song. As a sum of its parts, the production is a groovy bop. Looking deeper, there are many moving parts that shine individually. From the aforementioned standout bassline, to the funky guitar chords, to the synth arpeggios in the pre-chorus, to the synth interlude, the individual parts have their own character. “Be Sweet” is peak pop production and a top-tier pop song from Japanese Breakfast. It’s catchy, it’s love, and it’s something you can sing to your boo.

Japanese Breakfast gets the most intimate on Jubilee with “Posing In Bondage”. Zauner uses the idea of bondage in terms of the bondage of monogamy and commitment to a single person, and the beauty of it. The track feels like a speech or declaration of love to someone and it’s beautiful. The slow buildup in the production is nice and keeps the song from being boring. Instead of staying in first gear like the song appropriately started in, things click into the next gear slowly, steadily, and without a hitch.

“In Hell” has a peppy sound with a vibe of driving through the city. The lyrics are quite the opposite though. It’s a song about not being able to have the love of your life. The process to find that special person was long and hard, but in the end they are out of reach. The change in melody in the bridge that transitions into a bigger version of the chorus is quite nice and follows the trend found throughout the album of a building sound that crescendos to a peak at the end.

Things get a little sleepy near the tail end of the record with “Tactics”. An orchestral dreamy tune, it suffers a little from its aesthetic. It’s not dreamy in a way that paints a grand picture like “Paprika”, but rather dreamy in a way that’s sleepy and not very engaging. It’s a sweet tune, but lacks any grip that’s present on previous tracks.

Things do pick back up with the closer “Posing For Cars”. It’s a culmination of the elements and themes of the entire record which makes it a proper closer. The songwriting is vulnerable with lines like “I’m just a hollow root pushing through/I’m just the empty space inside the room”. The first half of the song is bare with just Zauner’s vocals and acoustic guitar. The second half is characterized by a growing build up of the production–—similar to moments you hear on earlier portions of the record. It starts with synths, and a simple hi-hat and snare drumbeat. The production develops into more synths and a more complex drumbeat before the grand aforementioned guitar solo that wraps up the record neatly in an epic fashion.

Jubilee mostly flourishes where production is grand, or at least transitions into a grand ending. The more subtle melodies tend to fall flat, and though they can be presumed to be changes of pace, they rather make you want to get back to the higher energy of the other tracks. The crescendos and growing production present at many points on the record imitate the feeling of joy that comes with a sigh of relief. The songwriting is solid and the themes of love and joy are conveyed with a personal touch.

Jubilee is jubilant in its production and emits a sense of release after years of grief and sadness that characterized much of Japanese Breakfast’s work.

Favourite tracks: Be Sweet; Kokomo, IN; Posing In Bondage; Sit; In Hell; Posing For Cars