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"Soft Sounds From Another Planet" is the second full length studio album by Japanese Breakfast, the solo musical project of Michelle Zauner of Little Big League. The album was released July 14, 2017 through Dead Oceans Records.
At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from critics, the album received an average score of 83, based on 20 reviews, indicating "Universal acclaim ".
User Album Review
Michelle Zauner, sole creator of the indiepop project Japanese Breakfast, made 2016’s Psychopomp amid the death of her mother from cancer, a catastrophic event that can easily turn anyone to an unfamiliar path. For Zauner, it meant an ongoing search for solace in loss. Soft Sounds From Another Planet continues that journey. It’s a somber, starry lullaby that results in periods of fitful sleep marked by struggles with fading love and death’s vague mystery.
But there’s something comforting about the record too, with its interlocking muted chords, muffled drums and sudden shocks of electric guitar that adds sharp slices of lightning. Soft Sounds is full of pretty interludes of ambient noise, mixed with shoegaze and electropop touches.
With undulating, ever-moving synths, the acoustic pop of “Body Is a Blade” attempts to bridge the divide between grieving the past and moving on, acknowledging the ability to feel pain is a gift. Paying homage to icons and decrying “cruel men” on “Till Death,” Zauner simply lists mental ailments and stages of grief, without embellishment, and it delivers huge impact.
The mourning bells that close the album show Zauner still can’t shake the knowledge that she’s bound for the same fate as her mother, but it’s only one part of the story. The sparkling synths and muted mood that help define Soft Sounds From Another Planet may also be the transformative vessel Zauner travels through in her remaining days of love and life.
Reviewed by Emily Reily for pastemagazine.com.
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