So it’s very late at night, and you’re driving a van or an old truck, and you are very far from home, and everyone else in the car, if there is anyone, has been asleep for hours, and on this highway, you keep seeing dead dogs. That’s where Soft Sounds From Another Planet, the second album by Japanese Breakfast (aka Michelle Zauner and some dudes) starts. It’s not the first line, no, but that’s where the whole album is set–hurtling down a deserted highway in the early morning, with nothing else to do but think about what lead you here, and where you’re going. Soft Sounds is my favorite album of the year, and it’s not even close. It’s at the point where the question isn’t even worth thinking about. Given the amount of time I’ve spent listening to it, and the emotions I still have every single time, to even consider any other album would be ludicrous.
The exact same basic bio is in every critical piece on Zauner, so to get it out of the way she’s the Korean-American musician whose breakthrough was last year’s also very good Psychopomp, an album largely about dealing with the drawn-out death of Zauner’s mother from cancer. So what is Soft Sounds From Another Planet? I like to think of it as a vortex of memory, that’s hurling us through a slew of images and scenes, as feelings of regret, love, loss, and desire, rush past us and hit us all over again, until we eventually collide with where we started, but unfortunately with less understanding than ever. I think I like it because it’s album about moments, moments that turning points in a life, as seen from a position where they’ve already been distorted, but distilled, by memory.
But back to the van. A gauzy voice, Zauner’s breathy register, drifts out of a steady guitar pulse. “I wanna be a woman of regimen/a bride in her home state/a diving woman of Jeju-Do.” This is the dream. Jeju, off the coast of Korea, is notable for its women divers, who harvest conch, abalone, etc. from the coast, but there’s so much implied in just three lines. To be a woman of “regimen,” a serious woman, contented, un-frivolous, in opposition to being well, a touring modern indie musician. “A bride in her home state,” not only feminine and tethered, in a societally sanctioned way, but in a homeland distant and probably alien to the bi-racial, Oregon-raised, Zauner. Basically, she wants in her life everything inaccessible to her now. It’s, I think, a common sentiment to urban creative-types, the idea that this life is a curse, and we would all be less anxious, less depressed, in a pre-modern society where we could do simple rewarding labor in a society that’s liberated us from the freedom of choices we have in our lives. “I want it all” comes in and repeats, increasingly processed, before being swallowed by guitar noise.
Zauner’s vocals come back in, but not so arrhythmic or as reverby. This is where she is. Driving… somewhere. “The men have gone and left again/and no one’s shocked or blames them” is the pragmatic answer to the dream of Jeju-do. It’s another wasted day on the road, and another dead dog, the third, Zauner tells us, she’s seen on this highway. “When I get back there baby/gonna make it a home,” she tells someone who can’t hear her. The chorus returns, except this time it’s “you’ll have it all,” the dream of self-actualization replaced with the drive to provide that for someone else. There’s a whispered “I’ll have it,” that’s cut off by a swirl of guitars, as a long instrumental outro takes us back in time.
That long instrumental outro is replaced by a funky night-time pulse. We’re still driving, because the song “Road Head,” is about road head. Zauner’s lyrics, on Psychopomp and here, are often sexual in a way that catches people off guard. See “when we wake up in the morning, will you give me lots of head,” from “Everybody Wants to Love You.” But on this album (especially “Boyish,” which I’ll get to later), pleasure is a one-way street. “Last ditch desperate/like a makeshift siphon,” Zauner objectifies herself to save something she can see now was doomed. Check out the way the bass, synths, and double or triple tracked vocals punch in right after the first verse, turning the words “going home” into a plaintive smear. “‘Dream on, baby’/ where his last words to me,” and then Zauner is gone on another highway, the shared setting providing the bridge between “Diving Woman,” and “Road Head.”
The next song is called “Machinist.” I don’t really like Machinist. There’s a ton of speech-to-text effects and auto-tune on Zauner’s voice here, which should be a crime, and the allegorical concept makes the whole thing a little less emotionally immediate than the rest of the album. But there’s a slightly funny sax-solo that I enjoy, and the lyrical matter continues the theme of “having it all,” this time with the kind of easy metaphor being in love with a robot as being in love with an emotionally unavailable man, which is punishing even if you’re both trying. It was the lead single, but I don’t know why. Moving on.
“Planetary Ambience” is the come-down from the disco-pop of “Machinist,” then we’re into the title track, the next milestone in Zauner’s memory tour of lost love. This pairing is more tragic than anything. Zauner want to keep her partner from “abusing [him]self for no reason at all” while she promises to “show you the way to hurt me.” A harsh burr interrupts the song’s gentle waltz. “In search of a soft sound from another planet… searching for goodness while the cruel men win.” Fittingly, it’s a kind of mission statement for Soft Sounds, a moment of realizing, in the present, when you first realized something in the past.
“Boyish” closes out side A with our last failed relationship. Zauner pitches herself the most lyrics on the album so far, and knocks it out of the park. I think Michelle Zauner might be the best Indie musician working at singing the word “me.” Listen to the indignant, piercing whine of “you’re embarrassing meeeeeee” that opens “The Woman That Loves You,” it’s multiple appearances on “In Heaven,” and then the pre-chorus of “if you go to her/don’t expect to come home to me” on “Boyish” and try to find someone better. It has a slightly resigned sigh, mixed with impotent, pleading, anger. “I can’t get you off my mind/I can’t get you off in general” is the star couplet here, calling back to “Road Head”‘s sexual self-loathing, but the humor of the line masks Zauner’s deeper insecurity. “Here we are we’re just two losers,” goes the next line, “I want you and you want something more beautiful.” Suddenly the meaning of the title snaps into focus.
The next verse lets Zauner turn some of her frustration around, with an “if you don’t like how I look then leave,” but when the chorus comes back they’re still together, in a restaurant where Zauner’s boyfriend can’t stop checking out the hostess’s lips while Zauner runs her “ugly mouth.” At the end, Zauner’s reduced to pleading “love me” with increasing desperation.
Our hero is at her lowest point, but things get better in “12 Steps,” kind of. This is the song where real-life Zauner meets her husband, but unfortunately, she’s with someone else at the time. “12 Steps” captures the conflicting emotions of when you know you’re doing something bad to someone else, but you’re too happy too feel the appropriate amount of guilt. It also just fucking rocks! It’s so catchy, and if I was trying to hook someone on J-Brekkie with one song it would be this one, for the pre-chorus guitar bridge alone. As Zauner, explains things to her soon-to-be-ex, she pleads for absolution: “so tell me ‘I don’t blame you/he’s the one that you wanted… I can’t blame you/it’s just our love ran it’s course and it’s a love that’s long gone.” Who knows if she gets it, but, as Zauner tries to explain to both us and her ex, the relationship wasn’t worth saving all that much anyway, and she’s got something else to look forward to.
I like, but don’t really have much to say about “Jimmy Fallon Big!” and “The Body Is A Blade.” “The Body Is A Blade” looks back, one year later, at the same era as Psychopomp, stirringly evoking the feeling of stumbling through life after trauma, while “your body is a blade that moves while your brain is writhing.” It’s really good, I swear, just not as good the two songs after it.
“Til Death,” is kind of, as the title implies, a wedding song. It’s not about a wedding, but it’s a love song, to the guy we met in “12 Steps” and who Zauner is still married to. And this is where the album makes the leap from good to great, because I don’t think there’s a better portrait anywhere of 21st century pomo millennial than this song. It’s a song to dance to at your wedding. “Til Death” is, swear to go, basically a Disney ballad, except with mature (as in emotionally mature and adult) lyrics and filtered through Indie studio production. I could just list every great line from the song (“I don’t deserve you but I’m giving it my best”) or try, again, to describe the way Zauner’s voice strains and belts out each one, but it’s useless. The important thing is the way the final show-tune key-change and wedding bell backing contrast Zauner’s cooed list of traumas, fears, and mental health issues. “Teach me to move ,” she says to her partner, “teach me to breathe.” We may all be irrevocably fucked in the head, but with love, it can all get easier. I can’t think of anything more touching.
When I evangelize this album to people, as I have been to basically everyone I know for the last two months. I usually tell them, by way of recommendation, “I cried.” And the part that I cry during, invariably, is this last song, “This House.” I feel a little pavlovian welling at the opening guitar chords, but then, every single time, at the line “what if one day I don’t know you,” I just lose it. Since I first heard this album I’ve lied in bed at night giving myself chills just thinking about this song. The other day I was working from home and listening to the album on my ipod. When this song came on I sat on my couch and outright bawled for two minutes. My body and my mind simply cannot take it.
When I first started planning out what I was going to write about Soft Sounds From Another Planet, I thought about doing this whole multi-paragraph exploration of like, my particular emotional situation and how it might inform my love of this album. I was going to hide it here at the bottom after 1,700 words about an album only a couple people I know actually care about because I feel like it, I don’t know, shows weakness. I’m about a year and a half post-grad and I think my life has settled into kind of a status quo. Since high school, I tend not to be a person who does a lot of things. In college it was kind of the same, but I was very, actively, sad about that. Now it’s all just pretty okay. I don’t do activities; I don’t “go out;” I don’t meet a lot of new people; I don’t really have sex. I mostly read stuff on the internet and watch movies. My opportunities to feel a strong emotion, over the course of a standard day or week, are pretty few and far between, which means it’s less terrifying lows and dizzying highs, a lot of creamy middles.
This is fine. I mean it could be a lot worse, and if I really wanted to live my life differently I could. But I think think get kind of… backed up, and when something, usually a movie or piece of music, gives me a reason to feel something very strongly, I think my response is kind of disproportionately intense. The only reason this paragraph is here is because it would bug me if I didn’t acknowledge to you that I know how this might be coming off (let you know I’m “in on the joke,” so to speak), or head off things that you might be thinking right now. Maybe given enough time, this era will start to worry me, and I will work to bring this epoch to an end. But it’s more like keeping an eye on a weird mole than say, coughing up blood. Sincerely, I thank you for reading this far. So maybe I’m just bored, and living vicariously through someone else’s experiences, or maybe you’re reading this and thinking that I’m seriously depressed (a suspicion which is likely about to intensify). Honestly, I don’t know.
Anyways, if “Til Death” is as close as an actual living 20-something can come to a fairy-tale ending, “This House” is what you think about when you haven’t seen your partner in weeks and it’s late and you’re alone on the highway and wondering if you made the right choice. It’s a song about how we’ll always be a little unsettled in our relationships. How we’ll always be second-guessing ourselves, always worried about the future, and how ultimately we’ll have to learn to be comfortable with the ambiguities, and with the unanswerable question of whether a human relationship is ever as “real” as we perceive it to be, or whether it’s all only “timing and championship” and if it is, the maybe that’s actually enough to be whatever it means to be happy. Jeju-do is where we want to be, but we will always live in “This House.” Unsettled and confused, but learning to accept what we can and continue anyways.
“Here Come The Tubular Bells” is the next song and it’s an instrumental. Then the album is over.
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