Come Sway to the Soft Sound of Jay Som and Japanese Breakfast at Neumos

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Poster courtesy of Jay Som and Japanese Breakfast

February 14th may be Valentine’s Day, but February 15th is Jay Som and Japanese Breakfast Day at Neumos and you won’t want to miss these shinning stars as they take their audience to soft, dream-pop land.

Jay Som (aka Melina Dutere) is a Bay Area native who has been a musician for most of her life. She started with the trumpet and dabbled in jazz, wind ensemble, and other forms of classical music, while picking up guitar at eight years old. She began to write and record her own songs at about 12 after being influenced by her musically inclined, Filipino-native parents. She has attributed her work ethic and “do it yourself” attitude to her parents’ influence. As immigrants, they understood that nothing would be handed to them, so they worked for everything and instilled the same drive in their daughter. In the early 2010s, she uploaded Turn Into onto Bandcamp, as a collection of “finished and unfinished” songs that would gather much online attention and come to be regarded as her debut album.

Photo by Andy Witchger

After the takeoff from Turn Into, Polyvinyl signed Jay Som and reissued the collection. She joined Mitski and Japanese Breakfast on tour and became one of the faces of the emerging wave of women of color amongst the indie genre. The three acts teamed up to bring the world perhaps one of the only tours to be built entirely off of three Asian-American women, which was groundbreaking and monumental as it brought representation within the white male dominated genre. After returning from that tour, Melina tried to settle into her new home in Oakland and furiously write and record her follow up album that would become Everybody Works.

The more intentional debut was released on March 10, 2017 and was recorded entirely by Dutere inside her very own bedroom studio. Everybody Works offers a more polished Jay Som, still chocked full of charm and emotion. Some tracks are fast-paced and catchy like the leading single “1 Billion Dogs” while other slower moments are also featured, like the heavenly, infatuation-based, “Lipstick Stains”. The shining gem of the album, for me, is the title track, “Everybody Works”, where Melina stresses over trying to make ends meet as a musician then pans backwards to revelation that EVERYBODY works. We are all working to be better people, or students, or musicians, or any number of combinations of all sorts of things that people could be striving to get better at. Jay Som offers an intense variety of sounds while still distinctly sounding like herself.

As another hard-working individual, Japanese Breakfast, or Michelle Zauner, fronted the emo band, Little Big League from about 2011 to 2014, before her band kind of fell apart and she ended up moving back to Eugene, Oregon when her mother was diagnosed with cancer. She began Japanese Breakfast as her own little outlet after returning home and wrote her debut, Psychobomp about two months after her mom’s death.

Photo by Danny Hernandez

At the time, she didn’t think much would come of it; she wanted to work a normal job like a regular person and to somehow heal from the tragedy she had experienced. But, nine months into her job, she was let go. Thankfully this was right around the time that the first track from Psychobomp came out and she watched one SXSW show turn into eight and record labels were flooding her email inbox with offers. She signed with Dead Oceans and joined Mitski and Jay Som on tour before releasing her second album.

Soft Sounds from Another Planet was released on July 14, 2017 to the acclaim of fans and critics alike. Once again, this sophomore release offers a more polished representation of Japanese Breakfast’s cosmic sound. This album still deals with Zauner’s grief over losing her mother at such a young age. The opening track, “Diving Woman” is based on her mother’s home, Korea, and the free-divers of Jeju Island, disciplined women who can stay underwater for long periods of time in order to gather conch, sea urchins, and oysters. Zauner could be compared to the diving women due to her perseverance in the face of failure and tragedy in her career, she stayed below the surface and eventually came up successful.

 

These two ground-breaking, emotionally-raw, and dreamy acts will be joined by the equally dreamy Hand Habits at Neumos on February 15. This event is SOLD OUT, BUT! Japanese Breakfast will be returning to WA in May for Sasquatch!

Keep up with Jay Som (@jaysomband) and Japanese Breakfast (@Jbrekkie) on Twitter and find all their music on Spotify!

 

 

HALEY PARSONS | good music made by someone besides white guys? can’t wait! | KXSU Music Reporter

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