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"Psychopomp" is the debut full length studio album by Japanese Breakfast, the solo musical project of Michelle Zauner of Little Big League. The album was released in the U.S. through Yellow K Records on April 1, 2016, and internationally through Dead Oceans on September 19, 2016.
At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from critics, the album received an average score of 76, based on 5 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
User Album Review
If Zauner's palette has largely softened, her subject matter hasn't, even though only two songs here deal specifically with the death of her mother. "In Heaven" welds the billowing, shoegazy coo of peak Asobi Seksu to distinct songwriting fit for the Sundays. The heartbreaking lyrics measure the distance between a mother's love and the effect of its loss, but Zauner sings in a forceful celebration of life. When she belts, "Oh, do you believe in heaven like you believed in me?/ Oh, it could be such heaven if you believed it was real," her heart sounds like it might burst.
It sets the tone for a record that loosely explores issues of dependency. The disco-tinged "The Woman That Loves You" and intimate closer "Triple 7" find Zauner playing "the other woman" involved with a married man. The latter is one of her characteristically blunt depictions of sex. "I love a man in uniform," she admits, before wrinkling the cliche: "'Cause he loves me like a slot machine from the valley of loose women in the cruel light of morning." Similarly, "Everybody Wants to Love You," a driving duet with Radiator Hospital's Sam Cook-Parrott, leaps swiftly from a one-night stand to marriage through varying emotional and physical demands—most notably, "When we wake up in the morning, will you give me lots of head?" These songs are never as clear-cut as dominance versus submission, and Zauner doesn't apologize or rationalize her desires, which is refreshing.
Reviewed by Laura Snapes for pitchfork.com.
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