At several points throughout their Wednesday night show at The Phoenix, Japanese Breakfast‘s Michelle Zauner repeatedly stressed how much the band enjoys playing in Toronto and clearly, Toronto loves Japanese Breakfast too, as evidenced by the enthusiastic, sold out crowd.
Japanese Breakfast definitely fed off the energy of the crowd (“You make it very easy to have fun at our job.”) and played an engaging set full of tracks from 2016’s Psychopomp and last year’s Soft Sounds From Another Planet. I was also pleased to see that the band has kept their cover of The Cranberries “Dreams” in their repertoire as well.
“Holy shit, this is a lot bigger than the Silver Dollar.” said Zauner, adding that they do remember their residency there very fondly. I remember it fondly too, having attended two out of the three nights the band played there during CMW 2017(and subsequently seeing them about two weeks later opening for Slowdive at the Danforth) and while I definitely preferred the shows in the smaller venue, there’s something very satisfying about seeing a band graduate to playing bigger venues to larger and increasingly more appreciative crowds. Hell, this crowd was so into it, they even cheered enthusiastically for a reference to Scholastic book fairs that Zauner made onstage, which is maybe one of the weirdest reasons to cheer I’ve ever seen at a show. That’s a good audience. And one of which Japanese Breakfast is entirely deserving.