Nov 13

Nov 13 Show Review: Japanese Breakfast Brings Jubilant Live Show to Sacramento

Japanese Breakfast
w/ SASAMI
Ace of Spades
Sacramento, CA
November 9th, 2021

Photos and Review by Jared Stossel

I’ve been covering a great deal of metal and heavier rock shows lately. This isn’t new; it’s a genre that I’ve loved since I was a teenager. But sometimes, getting out of your comfort zone is a good thing. It allows you to broaden your horizons and listen to artists you never would have thought about checking out. I had been hearing about Japanese Breakfast (stage name for musician Michelle Zauner) for the last several years, so I was excited to learn that she would be taking on an extensive run of Northern California tour dates. There were many to choose from, but I ended up catching her electrifying performance at a packed Ace of Spades in Sacramento.

The show was relatively shorter than ones that I have been attending lately, with only two bands on the bill (including the headliner). The show was opened by SASAMI, a dazzling up-and-coming artist that pulled me into her nearly forty-minute set. With a backing band draped in all black and a take-no-prisoners attitude, SASAMI played through an eclectic mix of songs, some of which featured vocal lines sung through an overly distorted microphone. It was chaotic yet coherent, combining elements of grunge, punk, and noise rock in a performance unlike anything I’ve heard in a long time.

Japanese Breakfast took the stage to a roar of applause just a few minutes after 9 PM, traversing her way through a beautifully varied set of songs, most of which were taken from her 2021 album, Jubilee. There was, however, a smattering of fan favorites splashed in, with tracks like “Road Head”, “Everybody Wants To Love You” and “The Body Is A Blade” performed throughout. Zauner and her fierce backing band also brought out three covers: “Ballad 0” byBumper, a lovely cover of “Here You Come Again” by Dolly Parton, and “Boyish”, a song by Zauner’s former band Little Big League.

One of the highlights of the show for me came when Zauner performed tracks from the score she composed for the video game Sable, “Glider” and “Better The Mask”. The latter in particular is a hauntingly beautiful composition, noting to the crowd that this show was the first time she had ever played it by herself on stage. I’m not even much of a gamer anymore, but I’m now intrigued to check out both the soundtrack and the game itself to see what it’s all about. After the solo performance of “Better The Mask”, the band returned to the stage to finish out the night with “Posing For Cars” and “Diving Woman”, sending the Sacramento crowd back into the world, better for having spent an hour and a half with Japanese Breakfast.

Japanese Breakfast Set List
Paprika
Be Sweet
In Heaven
The Woman That Loves You
Kokomo, IN
Ballad 0 (Bumper cover)
Savage Good Boy
Road Head
Boyish (Little Big League cover)
The Body Is A Blade
Tactics
Glider (from the Sable soundtrack)
Posing In Bondage
Here You Come Again (Dolly Parton cover)
Slide Tackle
Everybody Wants To Love You

Encore
Better The Mask (from the Sable soundtrack)
Posing For Cars
Diving Woman