Live Review: Japanese Breakfast, Hachiku

Hachiku has all the finicky arrangements and versatility of sounds dreamt up by a musical omnivore in her bedroom. Anika Ostendorf's dreamy, whimsical songs, with titles like Moon Face and Polar Bears, are totally enjoyable. Endearing between-song banter in her gentle German accent wins Ostendorf plenty of goodwill, but the songs are able to back it up.

Japanese Breakfast mastermind Michelle Zauner tells us this morning was the first time in weeks she'd felt free from an illness that had been following her around on tour for weeks. This sense of relief and wellbeing is palpable in her performance tonight: she seems utterly jubilant as she bounds around the stage, guitar in hand.

Beginning with Diving Woman, it's striking just how big and full the band sounds in relation to their comparatively slight recordings. The opening song builds into a substantial wall of squall as Zauner and her three bandmates stretch out its coda. The set continues with highlights from the two Japanese Breakfast albums to date, which means pretty much everything they've recorded. Songs like Road Head and Heft are given meatier and, well, heftier renditions than on record. Jane Cum is transformed into a grunge song, all crashing symbols and roaring guitars. It sounds like something Sub Pop would love to have released in the early '90s.

Till Death is a gorgeously melancholy ballad about a partner helping Zauner deal with the loss of her mother to cancer. Two band members depart the stage, leaving Zauner alone with her drummer, who shifts to the keyboard. Zauner tells us they'll grace us with two soft songs "and then we'll dance". They play This House and Triple 7, the barest songs from each album, to the stock-still, glassy-eyed crowd. Then, true to her word, Zauner invites the others back onstage, and they tear straight into the ecstatic Everybody Wants To Love You. The crowd, perfectly motionless moments earlier, is thrown into fits of dancing.

As the first single from her most recent album, Machinist turned out to be something of a red-herring. Its AutoTune and drum machine make it quite unlike anything else on the album, but it's the perfect closer to tonight's impressively diverse set. In the final verse, Zauner dances her way through the crowd, starting an impromptu dance party wherever she goes. For a project started to help deal with personal grief, Japanese Breakfast has quickly become an effective means of publicly spreading joy.