Japanese Breakfast09.01.25
Vancouver, BC
This was Japanese Breakfast's stop in Vancouver for their 2025 tour, supporting their latest album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women). It's in the title, but the album certainly has a more melancholy sound to it than Jubilee, which dabbled in chamber pop, synth-pop, and a bit of new wave. This new one is more of an indie folk album. Regardless, I liked it enough, and since I had never seen them live, I jumped on a ticket when they announced the tour, with a stop at Vancouver's Orpheum Theatre. The Orpheum is a beautiful venue, though a strange fit for indie rock — it was the same deal with St. Vincent last year.
Ginger Root opened this show. I know he played a solo show at The Pearl, just across the street, last fall, but I was just coming back from Portola and didn't make it. His stuff has a vintage funky sound to it, and he leaned into the analog aesthetic with his setup, where he had a couple screens disguised as giant CRTs, with a cameraman going full-on MTV mode, erratically zooming in and out on each band member. Pretty good production value for an opener! I appreciated when he commanded the crowd to stand up near the end of his set... sometimes these Vancouver crowds are too polite.
The crowd remained polite for Japanese Breakfast, perhaps understandably so — it's a seated venue, and the first part of the set went through selections from the new album, which isn't really danceable. The stage design was beautiful though, with a giant clamshell acting as the centerpiece. I loved hearing "Honey Water", as it's easily my favourite from the new album, with a real crunchy shoegaze sound to it.
I'm pretty sure they've switched up the set list a bit from earlier shows on this tour, as "Boyish" was played a bit later than what I had read up from previous set lists. They also played their new track from the recent movie Materialists, "My Baby (Got Nothing At All)". I haven't seen the movie yet, but it's on my radar. Michelle Zauner stopped at one point to share how excited she was to see an H Mart right across the street from the venue, and that she had ate there twice before the show — Crying in H Mart is the name of her 2021 best-selling memoir, which I have yet to read, but would love to at some point.
Later in the show, once the band hit "Slide Tackle", Zauner poked fun at the Monday night crowd for being so well-behaved. But by proclaiming that "Slide Tackle" was meant to be danceable, she finally got the crowd to its feet. No fault of her own that it took so long — the venue is just weird for that. The energy remained higher for the rest of the show, as the band touched on more tracks from Jubilee, a bunch of them during the lengthy encore, including personal favourites "Paprika" and "Be Sweet".
They rounded out the night with "Everybody Wants to Love", rainbow coloured lights dancing around the venue. Overall, solid show, perhaps it would have been a better fit for the Commodore or the Vogue, but the band still put on a great show.
