Review
Japanese Breakfast
Soft Sounds From Another Planet

Dead Oceans (2017) Kevin Fitzpatrick

Japanese Breakfast – Soft Sounds From Another Planet cover artwork
Japanese Breakfast – Soft Sounds From Another Planet — Dead Oceans, 2017

All the best albums are made for mood. Some for when you’re feeling happy and carefree, and some for when you’re driving around the city in the pouring rain, with the neon lights of seafood restaurants and used car dealerships shimmering through your windshield and your tears. 

Japanese Breakfast is the latter, and Soft Sounds From Another Planet excels in that transcendent melancholy that we all need to wallow in every once in a while. Japanese Breakfast is the solo nom de guerre of Philadelphia musician Michelle Zauner, of Little Big League. The similarities between the two are there, but while LBL is more brash and in your face, Japanese Breakfast slows things down. Takes its time. And honestly, shows off more of what Zauner is really capable of. 

Tracks like “This House” and “12 Steps” and their sparse arrangements fit in nicely with the more layered, keyboard driven numbers like “Machinist”and “Road Head”. The contrast can sound scattered in lesser hands but here, there’s a solid, complimentary cohesion throughout. A reminder that an album of complexity doesn’t have to be complex to listen to.

Japanese Breakfast – Soft Sounds From Another Planet cover artwork
Japanese Breakfast – Soft Sounds From Another Planet — Dead Oceans, 2017

Related news

Recently-posted album reviews

Personality Cult

Dilated
Dirtnap (2025)

I had a hard time starting this review. I can’t help coming back to the fact that it sounds like Marked Men. It does, maybe intentionally so, as Dilated is the second of Personality Cult’s albums that is produced by Jeff Burke of Marked Men and Radioactivity. But I don’t necessarily like to say a band sounds like another band … Read more

Various Artists

Her Head's On Fire/Arms Like Roses - Split
Double Helix (2025)

Her Head’s On Fire (NY, NY) and Arms Like Roses (New Haven, CT) team up on this split 7” with two new tracks (one each band) of post-hardcore tunes that are both massive and melodic in their own distinct ways. "Universal" is the track from Her Head’s On Fire. Recorded by the band’s guitarist Jeff Dean, "Universal" came from the … Read more

Dead Bars

All Dead Bars Go To Heaven
Iodine (2025)

Dead Bars has a unique talent of taking the everyday, the experiences you see and live all the time, and shining a new light on them to make them personal and interesting. I've written about it before, yet it's my job to say this again and to make it interesting. It's what Dead Bars does, so it only seems fitting … Read more