#cherry glazer

[rubyvroom]

(Cherry Glazerr)

[lovesupercreature]

[longstemroses]

Slow hollow’s Dylan Thinnes jumping into the pit during their set 2.16.17 at The Teragram in LA

[lizzyxbee]

[azpartygirlz]

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2021

JAPANESE BREAKFAST

with Sasami at Club Congress (info/tix)

From the moment she began writing her new album, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner knew that she wanted to call it Jubilee. After all, a jubilee is a celebration of the passage of time—a festival to usher in the hope of a new era in brilliant technicolor. Zauner’s first two albums garnered acclaim for the way they grappled with anguish; Psychopomp was written as her mother underwent cancer treatment, while Soft Sounds From Another Planet took the grief she held from her mother‘s death and used it as a conduit to explore the cosmos. Now, at the start of a new decade, Japanese Breakfast is ready to fight for happiness, an all-too-scarce resource in our seemingly crumbling world.

How does she do it? With a joyful noise. From pulsing walls of synthgaze and piano on “Sit,” to the nostalgia-laden strings that float through “Tactics,” Jubilee bursts with the most wide-ranging arrangements of Zauner’s career. Each song unfurls a new aspect of her artistry: “Be Sweet,” co-written with Wild Nothing’s Jack Tatum, is a jagged, propulsive piece of ‘80s pop that’s followed by a sweetly melancholic ballad in “Kokomo, IN.” As she rides a crest of saxophones and synthesizers through “Slide Tackle,” a piece of nimble pop-funk run through a New Order lens, Zauner professes her desire to move forward: “I want to be good—I want to navigate this hate in my heart somewhere better.”

In the years leading up to Jubilee, Zauner also took theory lessons and studied piano in earnest for the first time, in an effort to improve her range as a songwriter: “I’ve never wanted to rest on any laurels. I wanted to push it as far as it could go, inviting more people in and pushing myself as a composer, a producer, an arranger.” She pours that sentiment into the album from the very beginning, weaving a veritable tapestry of sound on the opening track “Paprika.” To build such an anthem of self-actualization, Zauner maxed out the technical limits of her recording rig, expelling her anxieties and egoism with layers upon layers of triumphant horns and marching snares. “How’s it feel to be at the center of magic? To linger in tones and words?” she ponders, conjuring the widescreen majesty of Kate Bush. “I opened the floodgates and found no water, no current, no river, no rush!”

Later, on “Savage Good Boy”—a kooky, terrifyingly prophetic jam co-produced with (Sandy) Alex G—Zauner reduces the excess of modern capitalism to an emotional level, sarcastically imagining the perspective of a billionaire trying to convince his lover to join him underground as the apocalypse unfolds. “I want to make the money until there’s no more to be made/And we will be so wealthy, I’m absolved from questioning/That all my bad behavior was just a necessary strain/They’re the stakes in a race to win.”

“I don’t want to weave politics into my music in a way that feels cheap, but I couldn’t make something that doesn’t comment on the reality we live in,” says Zauner. “I think that you need to push yourself to care, and that’s part of what this album is about: If you want change, in anything, you need to go to war for it.”

At the end comes “Posing for Cars,” one of the longest, most visceral Japanese Breakfast songs to date. In its muted opening, Zauner quietly re-embraces impassioned facets of youth—wistful daydreaming, fierce loyalty—atop a bed of slowly-strummed guitars. Those same feelings pour out of her fingertips as she erupts into a cathartic, nearly three-minute-long solo to close out the record, with gradual swells of distortion that evoke the arena-sized guitars of bands like Wilco or Sonic Youth.

Jubilee is an album about processing life and love in the quest for happiness, and how that process sometimes requires us to step outside of ourselves. “Savage Good Boy” isn’t the only time Zauner takes on a persona; On the cavernous masterpiece “Posing In Bondage,” she imagines a woman left behind in the confines of an empty house, traversing the blurred lines between domesticity and dominance as she sings to an absent lover. Meanwhile, “Kokomo, IN” was written from the perspective of a small- town Indiana boy, forced to say goodbye to a girlfriend who’s shipping off to study abroad. But throughout Jubilee, Zauner is hardly fictionalizing her lyrics, instead pouring her own life into the universe of each song to tell real stories, and allowing those universes, in turn, to fill in the details. Joy, change, evolution—these things take real time, and real effort. And Japanese Breakfast is here for it.

[launderground]

CHERRY GLAZER : WASTED NUN

[thebittersweetdistractor]

CHERRY GLAZERR - Daddi (Official Video)

Directed by Danny Cole. "Daddi" is taken from ‘Stuffed & Ready’ by Cherry Glazerr out February 1, 2019 on Secretly Canadian.

[coolbrotherzine]

NEW ALBUM: CHERRY GLAZERR – APOCALIPSTICK

Cherry Glazerr are back, with a new album on the horizon. Apocalipstick is out on Jan 20th 2017, and its sound is vast and formidable – in short, really, bloody good.

The album’s track-listing boasts the same blissful sound that Cherry Glazerr are known for, but it’s bigger, better. As always, expect guitar-led songs. As always, expect pounding beats, induced by Tabor Allen’s drum kit. As always, expect wailing vocals and humorous lyrics, bent by Clementine Creevy’s teething tonsils. But hold tight for more intensity, more power and more destruction, cemented tight with energy anew.

Creevy is yet to experience writer’s block. The LA-based front girl tackles socio-political issues head on in I Told You I’d be with The Guys. According to Creevy, the song is about female solidarity – an idea which becomes evident as she howls the eponymous line. She claims that the song is both hopeful and dismal, though it sounds mostly dismal to this wide-eared writer.

Of the lot, though, the re-recorded version of Nurse Ratched wins by a hair – and not just because of the creepy low-budget horror-film-inspired video. The production of Joe Chiccarelli, who’s worked with names like Rufus Wainright, The Strokes and The Killers, really shines through on this track. He builds a wall of tension, pieced together by creepy tremolo guitars and an oh-so-satisfying chorus, which wouldn’t be nearly as great were it not for his exceptional mixing prowess. The Great Wall of Apocalipstick. Never has a wall been so coalescing.

Listen here

[words: James Alston]