Artist Title Album Plays
1 Japanese Breakfast Posing in Bondage Jubilee 8
2 Japanese Breakfast Be Sweet Jubilee 8
3 Courtney Barnett Pedestrian at Best Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit 7
4 Japanese Breakfast Slide Tackle Jubilee 6
5 Japanese Breakfast Savage Good Boy Jubilee 6
6 Japanese Breakfast In Hell Jubilee 6
7 Olivia Rodrigo bad idea right? GUTS 5
8 Japanese Breakfast Paprika Jubilee 4
9 Japanese Breakfast Kokomo, IN Jubilee 4
10 Olivia Rodrigo love is embarrassing GUTS 3

I’ve been reading Crying in H Mart and it’s already changed how I view Japanese Breakfast’s music: everything in Slide Tackle’s revisiting of an obsession and wanting to be better has become a matter of the fact that Michelle Zauner’s mother insisted she could never keep up with her extracurriculars as a child. Was football another one of these? Did she wish she could have ‘[navigated] the hate in her heart’ to stick with the sport? Is the ‘ache’ she sought to meet the one for a past love of a sport? Sometimes heartbreak is just heartbreak, as much as Gareth Campesinos’s love of football allegories may have conditioned me otherwise when someone mentions the ugly game: For Whom The Belly Tolls’s ‘Scout yourself as a one-man team/You’re a one-club man denied a testimonial’ and Every Defeat a Divorce’s turning-around of Three Lions will probably remain for the rest of my life the only things inspired by football that have brought any beauty into the world.

Jubilee is a beautiful album. It’s probably the most accessible of Japanese Breakfast’s albums, but retains the experimentation present on Soft Sounds from Another Planet on tracks such as Posing in Bondage, creating an incredible sense of sonic space between Zauner’s vocals and instrumentation lending a certain eeriness to the to the track that really makes the feeling of distance evoked by the lyrics work. Be Sweet is just a fantastic funk-inspired track that proves itself an inescapable earworm. The wail of ‘Hell is finding someone to love/And I can’t have you’ on In Hell serves as an emotional highpoint of the album and underscores that this isn’t really an album about loss in the abstract - not an album that would suit a pained sports metaphor - but an unrestrained ode to things that once were.

I worry that no matter how old I get, I will always find angsty pop-punk something that I get more than I would care to admit out of. GUTS, as an album, definitely evokes my teenage years - replete with questionable choices around capitalisation. This is strange given that I’m in my early (honestly) thirties and Olivia Rodrigo still has the benefit of youth. It’s probably something that doesn’t warrant too much analysis: I could get into how milennials have seemingly grown into an extended adolesence that is a reaction to being raised by the latchkey kids that were Gen X, but I don’t really think it’s that deep. It’s an album of good pop songs about heartbreak. I say good pop songs because I’m choosing to ignore the ‘rhyming’ couplet ‘Lacy, oh Lacy/skin like puff pastry’ on Lacy that is just… questionable. If my skin is like puff pastry, it’s time to switch up my skincare routine. That’s an affliction, not a point of praise.

Courtney Barnett is the writer I wish I was. She has this sort of sardonic playfulness and ability to turn a phrase that inspires nothing but envy in me. ‘Put me on a pedestal and I’ll only disappoint you/Tell me I’m exceptional, I promise to exploit you’ from Pedestrian at Best underscores this: she’s deeply uncomfortable with the success that’s she’s found and feels that she doesn’t deserve it - ‘Under-worked and over-sexed, I must express my disinterest/The rats are back inside my head, what would Freud have said?’ further underscoring this feeling of undeservedness. Given my own success in work and my own disaffection with, well, myself, it’s a real ‘it me, for real for real’. It’s a contrast with Lacy’s ‘I want to fuck you with my jealousy dick’, tending far more to ‘you shouldn’t want to jealously-fuck me.’ I think part of the reason that Barnett is a much better writer than me is that she wouldn’t try to make the jealousy-dick bit work because she found it funny. Maybe.

Note to self: find a better way to get a table out of ListenBrainz data than manually creating a Markdown table. No one should live like this.