For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) (Limited Edition) [Frosted Shadow Vinyl] [LP]

After a decade of making the most of impromptu recording spaces in warehouses, caravans and lofts, Japanese Breakfast's fourth album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women), is the band's first proper studio release.

Produced by Grammy Award-winner Blake Mills, frontwoman and songwriter Michelle Zauner pulls back from the bright extroversion of its predecessor, "Jubilee," to explore the darker surges churning within, the moody, fertile field of melancholy long considered the psychic state of poets on the brink of inspiration. The result is an artistic statement of intent: a mature, complex, contemplative work that evokes the romantic thrill of a gothic novel.

"For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)" follows a transformative period in Zauner's life, in which her double GRAMMY-nominated breakthrough album 'Jubilee' and bestselling memoir 'Crying In H Mart' catapulted her into the cultural mainstream and fulfilled her deepest artistic ambitions. As she reflected on this success, Zauner recognized the irony of desire, which so often combines bliss and doom. "I felt seduced into getting what I always wanted," she says, "I was flying too close to the sun, and I realized that if I kept flying, I would die."

The fate of Icarus and other doomed men lends "For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)" its most enduring theme: the dangers of desire. Like scattered light, its spectral parts guide the album's characters through cycles of temptation, transgression and retribution. In "Orlando in Love" - a riff on John Cheever's riff on "Orlando Innamorato", an unfinished epic consisting of 68 cantos by Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo - the hero is a good-natured poet who parks his Winnebago by the sea and falls victim to the call of a siren, his 69th canto (even in the sublime realm of classical myth, Zauner has a penchant for allusion).

"Honey Water" plumbs the silent rage of a woman married to an unfaithful man, watching him repeatedly give in to lust like a lowly insect bringing about his own demise Sadness is indeed the dominant emotional key of this record, but it is a sadness of a special kind: the pensive, forward-looking sadness of melancholy, in which recognition of the essentially tragic nature of life is matched by sensitivity to its fleeting beauty. Zauner finds enough room in it for glimmers of hope. It is the consolations of mortals that poets before her have called for and that poets after her will continue to rediscover: Love and work, and though they run through the album's many episodes like fortifying resolutions, they resound most clearly in the final song, "Magic Mountain," an exploration of Thomas Mann's famous novel of the same name. For her, every work feels like climbing a mountain, but from the top of "For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)" she looks to the future.