From Pitchfork Music Festival 2018: Japanese Breakfast are Radiant With Joy

It was a moment of pure exuberance when Japanese Breakfast closed their set Sunday afternoon with “Machinist,” the lead single off last year’s “Soft Sounds from Another Planet” and arguably the best song in their entire discography. During the 30-second saxophone solo outro, Michelle Zauner spun around and jumped on stage with a childlike enthusiasm, and her bandmates—of whom include the bassist from her previous band, Little Big League, one of her best friends, and no less, her husband—somehow all managed to match her same energy and bliss. It was an incredible climax to perhaps the most animated and joyful set of the entire festival.

In actuality, most of the songs on “Soft Sounds” and 2016’s “Psychopomp” aren’t really the type one might describe as animated. Listening to them through headphones is often a dark, visceral experience—take, for example, the anxiety-ridden “Heft” or the harrowing “The Body Is a Blade,” the latter of which repurposes an old demo from Zauner’s Bandcamp called “My Mommy is Sick.” Translating these recordings to energetic live experiences, then, could be a tricky undertaking. But Japanese Breakfast proved themselves more than up to the task. Each and every band member performed with vigor, throwing back their heads and dancing on stage, with Zauner at the helm of it all. Throughout the set, she animated her lyrics with expressive facials, bounded across the stage, and frequently ventured upstage to stand on and skip over the speaker sets. Somehow, she even succeeded in her attempt to make “The Woman That Loves You” sound anthemic, as she beat her chest in time to the drumbeat throughout each iteration of the chorus. She and her band also chose to forego any and all ballads from their catalog—and as lovely and poignant as “Till Death” and “This House” are, their decision proved shrewd: The result was one lively performance after the other—a 45-minute set that flew by before you knew it was over.

Equally uncanny was their ability to conjure a carefree, childlike joy, an impressive feat, no doubt, if for its emotional precision alone. Around midway through the set, when they burst into “Everybody Wants to Love You”—their most jubilant song by a long shot—the audience echoed Zauner unfailingly throughout the chorus, which consists only of the title line bellowed in a repeated back-and-forth. There was a beauty in how simple, yet exuberant and evocative the exchange was. A similar exchange took place during their luminous cover of The Cranberries’ “Dreams” later on, when the crowd sang along to the iconic 40-second outro—an ecstatic, pirouetting vocal line repeated again and again until the song’s resounding end. Throughout it all, Zauner matched the joy that the live renditions naturally evoked. As she made direct eye contact with and grinned out at members of the audience, it was hard not to share her elation.

Perhaps there were a couple of minor shortcomings about their performance—when the undulating synth line that glimmers halfway through the studio recording of “The Body is a Blade” was drowned by guitarwork a hair too loud; when the pristine transition between back-to-back tracks ‘In Heaven’ and ‘The Woman that Loves You” couldn’t achieve the same level of seamlessness live. But that’s all nitpicking: at the end of their set, it was difficult to walk away from the Japanese Breakfast set without an easy, nostalgia-tinged bliss, or at least the beginnings of a smile. Unsurprisingly, they delivered an impressive, exuberant experience—yet another one for the books.

—Staff writer Patricia M. Guzman can be reached at patricia.guzman@thecrimson.com.