Japanese Breakfast, Dollhands and Faye

Japanese Breakfast, Dollhands, and Faye

Saturday, June 9, 2018 at 9 p.m.

Neighborhood Theatre
511 East 36th Street
Charlotte, NC 28205

Tickets: $13 plus

Japanese Breakfast is the solo musical project of Michelle Zauner of Little Big League. Under the alias, Zauner has released two studio albums: Psychopomp (2016) and Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017).

Prior to her solo project, Michelle Zauner fronted Post Post, an indie pop band with students from Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, then started the Philadelphian emo band Little Big League. Zauner fronted the band between 2011 and 2014, before returning to her hometown of Eugene, Oregon in 2013 as her mother was diagnosed with cancer.

While in Oregon with her family, Zauner began recording solo music. Zauner described the project as having much more to say following Tropical Jinx, the 2014 studio album by Little Big League. Originally, Zauner had begun to record early samples of music as a self-meditative and “instant-gratification” feeling.

On April 1, 2016, Japanese Breakfast released their first studio album, Psychopomp, under Yellow K Records. Zauner described the debut album as quite “dark and heavy-handed,” although she had a desire to make the music, urgent and “sonically upbeat.”

On June 23, 2016, Japanese Breakfast was signed to the Dead Oceans label. Their second album, Soft Sounds from Another Planet, was released through the label on July 14, 2017 and to “universal acclaim” with a Metacritic score of 83. In Brian Shultz’s review for The A.V. Club he gave it an A- grade and said, “there’s a confidence and crispness to Soft Sounds that shows just how fully realized Zauner’s formerly homemade experiments have become.”

The name of the band, according to Zauner, is a juxtaposition of Asian exoticism and American culture. Despite the name, Zauner is not of Japanese descent, but Korean and Jewish descent. Zauner chose the name because she “grew up relating to Japanese culture quite a bit because it felt like the closest thing [she] had” to Korean popular culture in America. – Wikipedia

Dollhands

Faye

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