If I were to ever make an album, I'd want it to sound something like this
Review of The Japanese House's "In the End It Always Does"
The Japanese House—In the End, It Always Does
Released June 30, 2023
Even before I listened to this album, I have been rooting so hard for Amber Bain, the artist behind the moniker The Japanese House, and I was so happy to see this album received so well. Bain is signed to the independent label Dirty Hit that is also the label of the 1975, Beabadoobee, Pale Waves, and as of recently, Jack Antonoff. I’ve long been impressed with the label’s ability to support artists like Bain to make the work they want to make and continue being independent. Moreso than most labels it seems, DH really seems to be a label that understands artists, their processes, and their visions. And because I love so many of the artists on Dirty Hit, a win for any DH artist feels like a win for DH as a whole and means they can continue supporting artists like The Japanese House.
It was written in a brief description posted on Spotify that “Bain's sound and style is characteristically wide open, her vulnerabilities, thoughts and innermost feelings stitched into a tapestry of gorgeous, elevated pop music,” and that especially feels true of this record.
In addition to Bain’s vulnerable lyrics, she produced the album’s summery, pop feel with George Daniel of the 1975, and Chloe Kraemer. The album also features contributions from Matty Healy (also of the 1975), Katie Galvin of MUNA’s backing vocals on “Morning Pages” and writing on “One for Sorrow, Two for Joni Jones,” while Justin Vernon (also known as Bon Iver) has a credit on “Over There.” Interestingly, that track was also later sampled by Travis Scott on “My Eyes” for his album UTOPIA.
There’s a great podcast called Tape Notes which has an episode in which Bain, Daniel, and Kraemer talk about the making of this album. Even though I am not technically gifted musically, I still very much enjoy hearing artists discuss their process of creation and I particularly enjoyed hearing about the collaboration process amongst the three of them.
The album opens with “Spot Dog” which has a unique instrumental intro that creates the sonic world of the album and prepares the audience for where the music is headed. The rest of the album takes sonic cues from other artists I would place in the same stylistic neighborhood as The Japanese House, including HAIM, (“Touching Yourself” sounded like it would be at home on their third album, Women in Music, Pt. III) and Caroline Polachek inspired vocals on “Boyhood.” Although MUNA is elsewhere on the album, I would have loved to hear their touch on “Touching Yourself.”
Favorites include “Touching Yourself,” Sad to Breathe,” “Boyhood,” “Indexical Reminder of A Morning Well Spent,” and “Sunshine Baby.”
The title, In The End It Always Does speaks to the thematic through line of this album which is acceptance. Whether it’s Bain’s acceptance of herself and her identity, heard on “Boyhood,” or the acceptance that a relationship is really over, like on the album’s closer “One for sorrow, two for Joni Jones.” Bain said of that track that she was “trying to encapsulate that feeling, a sort of ode to that feeling when Emma Thompson stands there and cries when she’s holding the CD in Love Actually,” and that the lyrics are “talking about how it’s so sad that you think your life’s going to end [after a break-up], but actually day to day, you’re just going to be walking in the park with your little dog and everything’s going to be pretty much the same.”
Even though the closing track of the album encapsulates the spirit of the album’s title, it’s the third released single, “Sunshine Baby” that seems to serves as a thesis statement for the album as a whole. The track represents what Brady Brickner-Wood wrote in his Pitchfork review, “a beautiful equilibrium, wedding perceptive writing with bright, buoyant production.” The summery vibe of the music matched with the lyrics that come from a place of looking back from a gray, cold reality to a warmer, more romantic past, wishing you were back in a moment where everything was happy instead of in this current moment where it’s not.
“Sunshine Baby” was also the first song I heard from this project, featuring backing vocals from the inexplicable, at times problematic the 1975 frontman Matty Healy. Back in June 2023, when Bain was in New York promoting this album, she did an acoustic performance of “Sunshine Baby” for Sirius XM and Healy was in attendance to perform his backing vocal part and play piano alongside Bain. They also performed a cover of Shania Twain’s “It Only Hurts When I’m Breathing,” with Healy quietly accompanying Bain again on guitar. For all that was going on in Healy’s public life in the early months of 2023, I mean, given all the attention on him in the weeks before this performance, I wouldn’t have blamed him if he wanted to lay low and stay out of sight, but he didn’t. He showed up to support his friend and label mate when he didn’t necessarily have to and I thought it was touching that he would do that.
Now having heard the full album, the choice to cover that particular Twain song also feels fitting given the lyrical themes of this album, particularly the song “Sad to Breathe.”
In reading about this album, the lyrics are yes, about heartbreak, but I was surprised to find out that this whole album spans multiple heartbreaks Bain has experienced. “Sad to Breathe,” Bain said, was one of the first songs written for this album and was written after the split from her partner that inspired her first album, Good at Falling. “You always get what you want” is also about this relationship and was written when Bain was still a teenager. Whereas other songs on the album, including “Over There” and “Morning Pages” are about a throuple relationship she was in during lockdown in which one of the partners left. She talks about almost having this peaceful, domestic life where she and this partner were together all the time to then that partner leaving and not being there at all and how that deeply impacted her.
In this album is a kind of vulnerability that makes art cathartic, a kind of openness that I think many artists want to claim that they have but very few actually do. Ranging from tiny mundane moments like ““Indexical reminder of a morning well spent,” to an angrier, almost taunting vibe like on “Friends,” Adele Julia wrote in her review for Gigiwise, it is "so rare to find pop music [...] that holds honesty at its core despite the potential for rejection, creating an album that feels immediately resonant.”
I also like that in many of the songs the verses repeat. I don’t know if it’s because of pop’s tendency to be formulaic, but there are actually no rules dictating that songs have to have a complete and clear narrative structure, sometimes songs can be more abstract and read more like poetry. And sometimes songs don’t even need to be quote-unquote finished to be a hit, just look at my favorite example of this in M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes.” (And yes, this is my second time mentioning this song and the fact that it’s technically unfinished in a review, if you remember when I referenced this before, respectfully no you don’t.) The story that Diplo gives about the creation of that song is that the reason the verses repeat is because he and M.I.A. never went back to write out the rest of the song and it went out in that demo-like state. That, for me at least, made me rethink what I thought about the rules and structures of popular songs. Of course there will be purists who want to disqualify anything that doesn’t fit the rules, but this is art! There are no rules! And anytime there ever have been rules about what art should and shouldn’t be, something like Dadism or punk rock come along to challenge it and I think that disruption of expectations and rules is such an important part of the art lifecycle.
Overall, I really applaud Bain for her honesty and vulnerability in her songwriting. It’s writers like her that give credence to what Ethan Hawke has said about art and artists, that people don’t think they need them until something happens in their life and they’re left asking “Has anybody ever felt this bad before?” Like when we ask what 5 or 10 records would you bring with you to a deserted island, I often think about if I were to make an album, what, out of all the music out there, would I bring into the studio to inspire or guide me, and I think this is album might be one I would bring. I’m still learning a lot about production and the technical side of music, but I know that George Daniel is a good producer and I’m excited to see him continue to work in this capacity with other artists. But as I am more of a lyrical-minded listener, this album affirms to me why artists even make music at all—to stand up and raise their hand to say, “Yes, I have felt this bad before, and here’s how I got through it.”