JAPANESE BREAKFAST

Line-up: When you break it down, Japanese Breakfast in its core is just Michelle Zauner. However it would be amiss of me not to mention that she has built a stable crew behind her for albums and live tours, so much so that if you turn your head you could see J Brekkie as a band. That line-up is Zauner's husband Peter Bradley on guitar, her former Little Big League bandmate Deven Craige on bass, and Craig Hendrix on drums.

Michelle Zauner’s Japanese Breakfast project has a backstory, and it forms such a tight link to how her career has progressed that it’s best to use this introductionary section to go through, lest it occupy even more space than it does in any of the reviews underneath. It’s such a shame though that it’s a sad story, revolving around the death of Zauner’s mother from cancer. Zauner had been a hard-trying musician before her mother succumbed to the illness, but her Midwest emo group Little Big League never got their big break and eventually the band split, partly because Zauner returned home to take care of her ailing mother. During the months to come and particularly after her death, Zauner kept her mind occupied through recording music; only rudimentary sketches and snippets of ideas recorded quickly without any greater plan behind them, but those snippets (released via Bandcamp - and not reviewed here because in all honesty there’s not much to say about them) became the groundwork for her solo project she dubbed Japanese Breakfast (in solidarity to generic East Asian exotism, being of South Korean heritage herself). A lot of Zauner’s career since has - for better or worse - been tied into one of her most tragic periods of her life as it’s served as inspiration to her albums, up until deliberately running away from it became another source of inspiration.

Therein lies one of the key strengths of Zauner’s music - the bare naked emotional honesty of it. Japanese Breakfast wasn’t expected to become as big of a success as it has and Zauner laced her earliest songs with plenty of open grief in the music and the lyrics - and that opened the door to her being generally comfortable with expressing raw emotion in her songs. Zauner doesn’t dress her lyrics in elaborate turns of phrase or artistic vagueness, and rather she grabs her topics by the horns and addresses them directly, though still elaborately. It doesn’t take long for her music to resonate: the emotional punch is always there and waiting to strike. I became a fan of her music - and hers in general - very quickly after discovering it and a great deal of that was the directness of her approach, which made her music vivid from the get go.

Yet Japanese Breakfast rarely leaves the listener into a crumbled emotional mess - not from an outset anyway - because Zauner dresses up her contemplations on loss and trauma in the most colourful outfits. The appearance and rise of Japanese Breakfast heralded the wave of female singer/songwriters in the late 2010s-early 2020s who all seemed to take their inspiration in equal amounts from both the most textural of 90s alternative rock and the most confessional of turn-of-millennium emo - and maybe it’s just her music being my first exposure to the “trend” but I still think she does it the best. Over her career she’s toned down the fuzziest of her shoegaze tangents and the nods to dream pop have become more lucid and more expressively Pop with a capital P, but the same threads of soaring choruses, sweetest melodies and brightly decorated arrangements connect the various facets of her discography together, always sweetening the songs about everyone dying with a lightness in her delivery that almost make them jubilant. It’s a common trick but rarely pulled off with such a deft hand as Zauner does. It’s also not all doom and gloom in the world of J Brekkie, and she does have an earnest love for unabashed pop songs - and those moments of untamed joy are a wonderfully radiant sunbeam breaking through the clouds whenever they appear.

The Japanese Breakfast story is still developing and I’m sure this will be one of the introductions I’ll be revising in times to come, as she further experiments and develops her sound (not to mention builds her own media empire with her critically acclaimed book and now a movie deal!). But even with her initial batch of albums she’s already made a sizeable dent into the indie world and in years to come I’m positive her influence to the general comings and goings of this scene will be canonised and documented more formally. She’s one of the most exciting talents to rise in the 2010s and as sad as it is how the story started, how it has gone from there has been nothing short of joyous.

Times seen live: 1 (2019)

Main chronology:

• 2016: Psychopomp
• 2017: Soft Sounds from Another Planet
• 2021: Jubilee

Other releases:

• 2021: Sable: Original Soundtrack

PSYCHOPOMP

1) In Heaven; 2) The Woman That Loves You; 3) Rugged Country; 4) Everybody Wants to Love You!; 5) Psychopomp; 6) Jane Cum; 7) Heft; 8) Moon on the Bath; 9) Triple 7

Less sad than you'd think, and instead a very thrilled introduction to great young songwriter.

A psychopomp is a spirit that carries the dead to the afterlife, and Psychopomp is in spirit much like that, release as Japanese Breakfast's proper debut following Zauner's mother's death in 2014 and paving her way to soon-to-be-critical success; you'll know this story if you've read the opening section of this page anyway. But against preconceived expectations, Zauner’s grief is mainly a framing device for the album rather than the end-all and be-all of it. Based on the backstory you might expect this to be a sad and heartbreaking affair but… it’s so far removed from that it’s a continuous surprise. The tragedy is present and acknowledged but it’s covered up in sky-touching melodies and textural wallpapers of noise, and it’s tucked between unabashed silly pop songs and general introspection.

Knowing the context it feels a little wrong to say this but Psychopomp is a rather joyous, even excited album. It’s not Zauner’s actual recording debut as a musician, but it finds her discovering how to express herself in the truest form with such a thrill that it comes through as vibrant energy. It sees her combine her history and past experiences with her aspirations going forward; quite literally too, as a good half of these songs were already featured in one form or another in her demo releases and “Everybody Wants to Love You!” is a song from her school-time band Birthday Girlz repurposed for her new career. The Japanese Breakfast sound as shown here is rooted in 90s alternative rock and though it’s all-around fuzzy and noisy (a more refined version of her earlier lo-fi releases, not really polished but not quite as raw either), how Psychopomp delivers its track is nothing short of immediate. Zauner’s sorrow seems to primarily come through as an escapist need to just make some loud noise and rock out to some big choruses: “Rugged Country” is like a throwback alternative radio hit built for speeding down the highway with its cunning double-chorus leading the way, “The Woman That Loves You” is an effortlessly cool shade of 80s gothic alt rock with some wonderfully lush instrumentation breaking through the thickly layered production, and the unashamed bubblegum giddiness of “Everybody Wants to Love You!” which seems to have escaped every accusation of being a novelty song that more critically cool critics tend to throw at lesser tracks, perhaps because it’s just that irresistibly lush.

Even the songs that directly tackle the tragedy that lead to the start of the project sound uplifting, maybe even most so out of all the songs. “In Heaven” expresses the strange loneliness after loss through appropriately heavenly string-accentuated chorus soars, blissful and poignant while light as a feather; meanwhile the anger and fear in the heart of “Heft” is found nowhere in its melodically lush bounce and its unfolding chorus characterised by its vocal trade-offs. The only exception to this is the title track, a short ambient interlude which features a voicemail recording of Zauner’s mother and completely overwhelms everything else for a brief moment with its sheer emotional weight, becoming the undeniable heart of the album despite its minimal presentation and size. And just to flip things further on their heads, when Zauner does introduce more solemn tones to the music she knowingly steers away from heavier topics: the shoegaze-indebted “Jane Cum” and its implosive waves of sonic heft are all about yearning between two people, while the stripped-down “Triple 7” (and the lead-in intro "Moon on the Bath") is appropriately all about intimacy and closes the album with an assured calm rather than as a sad farewell.

So maybe the chatter around Psychopomp just needs a little reframing, to not be considered as an album about Zauner’s mother per se but as a testament to Zauner herself. At under 30 minutes and with only seven actual songs with two interludes Psychopomp is frighteningly short - a borderline EP really - but it’s unwavering in its confidence and cohesion, a real all-killer no-filler experience (including the interludes) that packs in a few more little surprises than the length would give away. That’s all credit to Zauner’s vision and ability to pull things together, to take these strains of very varied sources of inspiration and tone and to then combine into something meaningful and, at the right moments, powerful. With her direct approach in both music and lyrics, and her raw and impassioned delivery throughout, Psychopomp can certainly strike a tearful chord when it catches you off guard. But it’s the balance of jubilant and poignant that makes Japanese Breakfast’s music what it is and above anything else, that’s the point that Psychopomp drives home loud and clear. It’s maybe a bit too slight to ever be considered a truly classic album, but its minute package packs a punch with powerful personality. One ultimately unique to Zauner, too, making this a very exciting start.

Physically: Thick gatefold, no booklet - the brief liner notes are printed in the inner folds. More photos of Zauner's mother and aunt, posing on the cover, inside.

SOFT SOUNDS FROM ANOTHER PLANET  

1) Diving Woman; 2) Road Head; 3) Machinist; 4) Planetary Ambience; 5) Soft Sounds from Another Planet; 6) Boyish; 7) 12 Steps; 8) Jimmy Fallon Big!; 9) The Body Is a Blade; 10) Till Death; 11) This House; 12) Here Come the Tubular Bells

A transitional album in style and tone, yet brought together with confidence and expertise so much it's more like a level up.

On Soft Sounds from Another Planet, Zauner finds herself in the center of multiple crossroads. Throughout the album she's standing between past and present: much of the record acts like a clearing house for older music (from her early Bandcamp demos to repurposed Little Big League material) that she wants to find a home for before she moves forward onto the next chapter of the Japanese Breakfast project, with other, brand new songs paving the way for that upcoming shift. That, in a roundabout way, also means tidying things up emotionally. The inclusion of all these older songs, which revolve around the loss of her mother and the trauma around it, are here almost like she needs to work through those feelings before she can confidently venture into newer (and perhaps less serious) topic territories. More concretely all of this also translates to changes in her music, with the shift from the textural lo-fi fuzz and indie elements of Psychopomp into the detailed hi-fi sheen and openly pop-nodding waters that crops up throughout Soft Sounds. You don't have to go far to tell there's been a change: Psychopomp opened with the scruffy wallpaper guitars and hazy tone of "In Heaven" like a dream you couldn't quite see clearly, whereas Soft Sounds starts up sharply with a steady, thick backbone beat leading up to glitzy indie disco headspace of "Diving Woman", each element ringing through with perfect clarity. Zauner has her feet in two different places throughout her second album, putting on different hats from song to song as she forges an idea of where she is presently out of putting together her immediate past and the tentative ideas she has for the future.

Transitional albums like this are rarely among an artist's crème de la crème, typically instead acting as curious artifacts for the fans to compare notes on as they chart through the discography and look at the pit stops between the defining records. Not so for Zauner, who pulls off this real-time change of places so well that you don't even realise it's happening. Soft Sounds from Another Planet comes across, against all common sense, like a hyperfocused and simultaneously more whimsical follow-up to Psychopomp, honing into what was so great on that album and putting it through different guises with wild, inspired joy (the album is nearly completely credited to Zauner and soon-to-be J Brekkie drummer Craig Hendrix, who I imagine were having a blast throwing ideas across to one another in the studio). While the bulk of the material has already been released one way or another, the way they've been transformed shows just how far Zauner's vision has extended in a relatively short time: the ramshackle demo versions of e.g. "Road Head" and "The Body Is a Blade" (formerly known under the far more blunt moniker "My Mommy Is Sick" in one of her demo EPs) have barely anything to do with the versions displayed here, and the tender last slow dance of the indie ball take on "Boyish" is from an entirely different planet than its original grungy emo version found on Zauner's former band's album. Instead of Soft Sounds coming across like an incidental freeze frame between two scenes, Zauner's musical evolution sounds like it's coming to bloom in front of one's very eyes.

A lot of this might have to do with the sequencing which - intentionally or not - partitions the album into smaller chapters, isolating the bigger shifts from one another while letting the smaller tweaks bridge the gaps. Across its breezy 37-minute duration the album moves from the sharpshooting pop barrage of its opening set, through the dreamier and textured middle of the album right into the emotionally gut-punching ending sequence, and each of these makeshift suites are impressive in their own right. From the outset, "Diving Woman", "Road Head" and "Machinist" do a great job pulling the listener in with their tight, hook-lead writing and precise production, taking the pop elements of Psychopomp into their logical conclusion. "Diving Woman" locks itself in its technicolour groove so much that the verses and choruses that begin the album become almost a distant memory (it's also a very fun bass riff to play on repeat!) and "Road Head" cheekily tiptoes on top of its funkily stuttery drum programming and radiates with carefree fun, both paving the way for Zauner going in for the kill with the should-be-hit "Machinist". It's pure escapist pop, draping itself in all kinds of over-the-top elements (a spoken word intro, robo-vocals, a concluding saxophone solo!) and navigating through them with featherlight agility and mastery, its soaring chorus brimming with a pure rush of giddy excitement; you kind of just want to clap at how well it's all pulled off.

The more atmospheric middle sequence, initiated by the ambient interlude "Planetary Ambience", brings the album back onto ground from its initial dizzy heights. After Zauner (and Hendrix) has had her fun in the sun, this is where the album's vulnerable heart begins to reveal itself and to some degree the next few songs take their cue from the more textural, atmospheric escapades of the earlier Japanese Breakfast material. The title track is a minimally gorgeous piece with a gentle americana lean (or am I saying that just because of the slide guitar?), growing from a soft whisper of sounds and synth pads into a quietly yearning ballad that still bears all the confidence of the early album. "Boyish" uses this as a launch pad to its bitter on the inside, sweet as honey on the outside late night ballad vibe, which suits its far better than its original midwest emo make-up ever did, and Zauner reclaiming the song under Japanese Breakfast makes total sense - and in the process, she creates a centrepiece classic that's going to form a special moment within her concerts for years to come. The retread into her past is completed by the perky and snappy "12 Steps" which injects a kick back into the album and is easily the closest thing on the album to Psychopomp, and the demo-familiar "Jimmy Fallon Big!" which appears as a formless sigh that bellows from its ocean-deep pillows of sound. The song practically demands headphones in order to lock onto its form, and serves as an expanded bookend to the ambient interlude that started this little segment - while also tonally delivering the listener closer to where the album heads next.

Soft Sounds from Another Planet has already proven itself to be a great album, its first two thirds delivering one striking song after another; this was in fact my first Japanese Breakfast album and by halfway point I was already convinced I had found something that deserved investigating deeper. It's the last few songs, though, that make it close to special. So far the album has strayed away from the more emotionally vivid shades that coloured Psychopomp even at its perkiest, but Soft Sounds simply loads them all in the end to ambush the listener right after their guard has dropped. "The Body Is a Blade" pulls Zauner's trauma following the loss of her mother right back into the spotlight, the small segment in the center of it describing the admin after the fact coming in with the kind of blunt clarity that can leave you reeling when you're not ready, and turns these notions into an alternative rock anthem: the Grandaddy-inspired bubbling synths that appear halfway through become the wings under the song's melancholy haze and sets it soaring in the most vividly poignant and bizarrely uplifting manner, and sometimes I think it might just be the best thing Zauner's ever written (the fact that she created this out of the barely-comprehensible fragment of an idea in her demo EP is insane). On "Till Death" Zauner pens an ode to her husband who steadfastly acted as her wall to lean against during the rough years when she needed it, and it pulls a reverse experience to the last song in how it sounds so genuinely sweet and awestruck that it becomes almost heartbreaking; it's an achingly beautiful piece, and like "Machinist" before it keeps on piling elements that could go horribly, cheesily wrong if handled differently (the horns just about stay safe, but then in come the syrupy strings, the choir-like backing vocals and the tubular bells one after another). "This House" ends the lushly arranged album intimately with just Zauner and her guitar, with little polish over the recording, reflecting on the time that's passed and the changes she's observed and felt. It makes for the perfect epilogue, not only because it forms the full stop to the whole narrative that runs through the first two Japanese Breakfast albums, but paves the way forward as she finishes processing one part of her story (to some degree literally, given all these old songs she's reviving) and gets ready to move forward to the unknown future, and from both a thematic and writing perspective it's the cherry on top of the final sequence - the tubular bell outro actually closing the album with a hint of "to be continued..." in the air.

That final song sequence is, as said, where Soft Sounds from Another Planet goes from an excellent follow-up on par of the debut to an outstanding body of work. It's so good that once you've become familiar with it, it starts to recolour your understanding of the rest of the album - and with that, it stops being just a transitional album even if in the context of knowing her next steps it still logically acts like one. But maybe the more appropriate term, as cringeworthy as it can sometimes be, is that Soft Sounds represents a significant level up. Psychopomp was razor sharp in its content but also raggedy in its form, and on her second album - now that the Japanese Breakfast thing seems to be taking flight - Zauner pushes forward with a producer's ear, placing more emphasis on the arrangements and detail on top of her already proven track record in songwriting. Soft Sounds from Another Planet sounds like a lot of thought went into how and what it represents, even if Zauner is still in-between worlds figuring out her direction - and that makes these great songs pop out even bolder. It doesn't overshadow any of the heart and soul, so much is clear from the last (proper) three songs alone, but rather emphasises what was already evident. However you want to frame it, Soft Sounds is a brilliant, downright definitive entry for Japanese Breakfast - and in many ways, too.

Physically: Three-panel gate fold, with an annoyingly loose CD slit so the disc keeps slipping out with the slightest movement. No booklet, instead the lyrics are all printed on the inner panels.

JUBILEE

1) Paprika; 2) Be Sweet; 3) Kokomo, IN; 4) Slide Tackle; 5) Posing in Bondage; 6) Sit; 7) Savage Good Boy; 8) In Hell; 9) Tactics; 10) Posing for Cars

Brighter and bigger - the moment where Zauner lets go of her loss and just creates music that makes her smile.

Going into Jubilee, Zauner had one simple aim and that was to just let her hair down for once in her public life. After two album cycles inherently tied to the loss of her mother where she spent every interview recounting the tragic last days while every night performing songs about her, with Jubilee she wanted to have fun making music again and to welcome some joy into her discography. Hence the sunnier aesthetic, the more elaborate music videos (including the adorably silly one for "Be Sweet") and of course the brighter music. While the steps she takes here are largely familiar from the previous Japanese Breakfast albums (the shoegazey "Sit" could have been ripped straight from Psychopomp), it's the more unashamedly jubilant side of Japanese Breakfast that's taking centre stage this time around. Both of the previous albums had a couple of moments that stood taller and more ecstatic than the rest - the out-and-out "pop" moments" - but which were side tracts to the greater musical thread; now the balance has shifted in their favour, with most of these songs almost trying to out-do one another with their respective vibrant gestures and, most of all, hook-like melodies.

That said, anyone who goes into Jubilee expecting only its titular emotion is going to find it a mixed bag. Of course it has its brighter spots and it's clear that they are the album's supporting columns: the colourfully bursting, gong-banging "Paprika" distills the brief breather of relief back in 2021 that we all allowed ourselves to feel when the world started carefully opening up again, the perky post-apocalypse billionaire fantasy "Savage Good Boy" is the cheekiest little thing Zauner's ever written, the jaunty "Slide Tackle" revisits the synth pop adjacent sonic ideas from Zauner's BUMPER collaboration project with co-writer Ryan Galloway. Above all there's the song of the summer 2021, the already mentioned "Be Sweet" - a song that's utterly impossible not to fall head over heels with, a refreshingly breezy and freewheelingly fun Big Pop Moment that gloriously rides on its wickedly groovy bass riff, swinging its gigantic hooks with wild abandon and immediately crowning itself as a career milestone in the Japanese Breakfast saga. But they're only some of the pit stops in the album's diverse but carefully considered world, where sadness and loss still exists because, well, they always will for those who've experienced them; or as Zauner herself points it out in "Posing in Bondage", "the world divides into two people / those who have felt pain and those who have yet to" (quoted almost verbatim from her book, or vice versa). Those emotions will likely always run through her music and they're on display throughout Jubilee as well, in songs that may not immediately convey their whole range on surface (the light-as-feathers "In Hell" and its bouncy keyboards in particular becomes crushing the moment you pay attention to the lyrics, which detail the euthanasia of the family dog first mentioned in "In Heaven"), and on "Tactics" she even brings back her family affairs but now moves her thoughts towards her increasingly more estranged father. Sometimes it feels like the whole idea of this being a "happy" album is a complete fabrication. But the key message here is that you first learn to live with loss and then you learn to allow yourself to live life again, step by step - and that's the careful positivity that Jubilee radiates.

Maybe the more accurate description would then be that Jubilee is full to the brim with the kind of confidence and certainty that comes with achieving closure. The first two albums had grand sweeping gestures and big melodies but were still - at least in their heart - intimate affairs, borne out of bedroom recordings and hanging onto traces of that. In contract, Jubilee sounds deftly produced and ready to take on the entire world. The common denominator across Jubilee's wide and vivid stylistic scale is that each song is a bold statement unto its own right, where every single moment is meant to be a direct hit right into the bullseye. It's no wonder that Jubilee left a bigger dent in its trail during its release year, receiving a wider audience as Zauner's own public profile coincidentally grew at the same time thanks to her side projects, and in some ways it feels like the album's more selfassured touch is a direct result of wanting it to reach and match those bigger leagues. In other words, it sounds larger and more decadent, and a bit more polished too but in a wholly positive way. That comes particularly across in moves like the technicolour detail of "Be Sweet", the regal orchestrations of the exuberant "Paprika" and the slow burn grower highlight "Kokomo, IN" (the americana-adjacent tone makes it sound like a Wilco song and I'm all right with that), the dizzily gorgeous otherwordly textures of the enigmatic dream pop swirl "Posing in Bondage" and the show-off guitar solo which closes both "Posing for Cars" and the album as a whole. Jubilee doesn't sit still stylistically but it's all brought together by how alight with excitement the album, and Zauner herself, sounds as the chance to paint with new entire new colour palettes is seized with glee.

Time will tell where Jubilee will ultimately sit in Zauner's story and how the next step goes from here, but at this point in time it sounds like a reintroduction: the opening act of the sequel to the story that the first two albums told, where our protagonist is now more experienced and stronger, ready to take on new challenges but at the present standing right over the edge of the end of the previous chapter. Both Psychopomp and Soft Sounds from Another Planet came from a very particular place and surrounding context, the likes of which normally do not accompany the beginning steps of a fresh artist. Jubilee has the aura of Zauner re-establishing Japanese Breakfast by showing the kind of music she wants to create without a tragedy casting a shadow over every note. On one hand, its stylistic quilt work of a tracklist and the lack of an underlying concept or theme (beyond the vague notion of not writing with a theme in mind) means it doesn't tie together as neatly as the previous albums did. But on the other hand, a good half of the tracklist could comfortably be considered among her best work (for what it's worth: "Paprika", "Be Sweet", "Kokomo, IN", "Posing in Bondage", "In Hell") and the rest of it isn't too far behind either, and that just makes for a really excellent listen. It's understandable that Zauner wanted a fresh start, and Jubilee is a strong statement that she doesn't have to chain herself to her loss in order to create music that moves.

Physically: Gatefold with a tri-fold packaging. No booklet, all lyrics and credits are layed out in the inner packaging.

Other Releases

SABLE: ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK

CD1 (Cities, Songs, Ruins, Forests & Insects) 1) Main Menu; 2) Glider; 3) Better the Mask; 4) The Ewer (Day); 5) The Ewer (Night); 6) Eccria (Day); 7) Eccria (Night); 8) Campfires; 9) Exploration (Ships); 10) Exploration (Ruins); 11) Exploration (Nature); 12) Beetle's Nest; 13) Glow Worm Cave; 14) Pyrausta's Ruin
CD2 (Biomes, Themes & Cutscenes): 1) Badlands (Night); 2) Hakoa (Day); 3) Hakoa (Night); 4) Sansee (Day); 5) Sansee (Night); 6) Redsee (Day); 7) The Wash (Day); 8) Chum Lair; 9) Beetle Detour; 10) Machinist's Theme; 11) Cartographer's Theme; 12) Mask Caster's Theme; 13) Mischievous Children; 14) Ibexxi Camp (Day); 15) Ibexxi Camp (Night); 16) Burnt Oak Station (Day); 17) Burnt Oak Station (Night); 18) Abandoned Grounds

An evocative, whimsical ambient/new age soundtrack that doesn't necessarily needs its context to stand on its own feet.

The early 2020s saw the emergence of a curious trend where indie game developers began to look outside the usual box and started to recruit indie musicians to score their games. The success rate of these experiments have been excellent as well, and Japanese Breakfast doesn't make an exception. Calling Zauner for the job does also make some sense: not only does her music have an atmospheric touch that shows she's able to set a concrete mood with instrumental sections alone, but in the run-up to Soft Sounds from Another Planet she promoted the album with a little JRPG-styled browser game (which was soundtracked with MIDI versions of the album's songs - which are a delight if you're a crusty millennial like me and remember MIDI versions of songs being a commonplace occurrence). So there is some precedent of Zauner clicking with the prompt, and the Sable soundtrack is a great first foray into formal soundtrack work.

Not to make this into a video game review, but a brief description of the actual game is helpful to understand the context of the music. Sable takes place on a largely barren desert planet, where the titular character embarks on a traditional rite of passage with her trusty (and rusty) hoverbike. The world is vast and open-ended, but there's always a goal of some sort right there in sight: another landmark to explore and conquer, another settlement to help out or another visible collectible to figure out a way to. The combat is minimal and practically non-existent, and the focus instead is on exploration and figuring out your own way in this big world, right down to the ultimate premise - the point of Sable's journey is to independently interact with the number of different factions and guilds of her world, so that she (and the player in turn) can make an educated decision at the end of her journey on which guild she joins, based entirely on what the player found most compelling during the hours spent playing. It's an open world exploration game done right, understanding what can make simple navigation in the world so compelling and adding enough side tracts to it without making it feel overloaded with distracting gimmicks. What really brings the game to life is its visuals which are inspired by French/Belgian comic greats: it looks like an artsy Euro comic come to life and it's beautiful, often stunningly atmospheric. It's a game of simple but strong pleasures, tied together by the atmosphere it cultivates.

Zauner's score for the game isn't particularly reminiscent of any Japanese Breakfast works, beyond the game's main theme "Glider" and the ending theme "Better the Mask", the former of which appropriately glides across a backbeat of skittering electronic yelps and the latter is an evocative piano ballad that could have been found in any of her prior albums - both which come with full vocals from Zauner and are also really beautiful songs. While Zauner's voice does make further cameos throughout the rest of the score in the form of wordless background harmonies, they're treated as just another musical element and mostly this is a set of full instrumentals. The indie rock guitars have been put away completely and the soundtrack's building blocks consist of strategically minimal piano melodies, solitary guitar twangs, whimsical percussion and oodles and oodles of textural keyboard and synthesizer waves. You can hear Zauner's inspirations throughout, with lots of classic JRPG and Legend of Zelda vibes, a hint of Joe Hisaishi's Ghibli soundtracks ("Chum Lair" could have come straight from the Totoro OST), elements of modern classical and new age - but the blend is her own. It stands out not just in the wonderfully explorative world of indie game soundtracks but in the whole Japanese Breakfast ouevre, immediately adding new colours into the palette of her back catalogue. It also succeeds in the goal that has been set for it, i.e. the music works wonderfully with the game: particularly the night time explorations are wonderfully enhanced by the music.

That said, I actually bought and heard the soundtrack long before I played the game, so I can attest to this also working just as well without that experience or context - when broken away from the game, it's actually simply an excellent ambient/new age instrumental record and that's also how I still primarily see it as. The Sable OST successfully navigates the tricky balance of a soundtrack by nature having to be fit to work as background music, but also to come alive enough to be a rewarding listening experience outside its intended setting. Its melodies and rhythms vibrantly travel across the spatial synthesizer pads and can bring either (or both) whimsy and wistfulness into the soft sounds. The music itself is evocative enough to create places in your imagination to wander around it, without needing the game to do so. That is a little familiar from the proper Japanese Breakfast albums, courtesy of those mostly instrumental brief interludes and bridging songs that have appeared in the previous records. The Sable OST has given Zauner the excuse to expand on those ideas and let them grow into full-length songs.

In summary, depending on one's preference for instrumental and primarily atmospheric/scene-setting music to begin with, the Sable soundtrack doesn't need to languish as "just a soundtrack" in a list of Japanese Breakfast albums. It's an often gorgeously evocative set of songs with delightful nods towards old videogame and anime music of yore, which works first and foremost as music and not only as background material where you would need to know the original context to unlock. Turns out, that's a soft spot for me and this album is something I like to pop on from time to time on a whim when I simply need something gentle, moody but cheery to fill the air around me, and it's filled a niche in my listening habits that I didn't know I needed. It would actually be quite nice if this gives Zauner an alternative path to jump into from time to time with further soundtrack work as it'd be interesting to hear her utilise these same instincts in other settings. And finally on a related note - while I argue that this album doesn't need the game per se, I would still also recommend Sable the game as well, but primarily because it's really a cosy gameplay experience that similarly doesn't need the bias of "it's the J Brekkie score game" to strike out.

Physically: Gatefold, with the two discs stored in the pockets on both cover sides. The openings face the centerfold so they're very awkward to get out. No booklet, all the credits are inside the gatefold.