Father John Misty
Mahashmashana
★★★★
BELLA UNION
Josh Tillman has always had a penchant for apocalyptic imagery, tied into his withering view of organised religion. Growing up in an evangelical Christian family in Maryland where at school he was encouraged to speak in tongues and told by church therapists that his anxiety and depression were a result of having “allowed demons into my life”, it’s little wonder that on 2017’s brilliant Pure Comedy, he lambasted systematic theology as a “prison of beliefs… like something that a madman would conceive”.
On that same album, in the slow-burning and dazzlingly explosive Things It Would Have Been Helpful To Know Before The Revolution, he offered a godhead perspective of Earth as a “bright blue marble orbited by trash” and almost welcomed a post-civilised return to primal times. Zooming out even further here on the title track of Mahashmashana – a riff on the Sanskrit word Mahāśmaśāna, meaning “great cremation ground” – he pictures the “next universal dawn” breaking over an incinerated planet where “all is silent” and every trace of humanity has gone.
It’s quite the arresting vision, bleak if joyfully delivered, and suitably matched to an enormous production highly reminiscent of the early ’70s sound of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, John Lennon’s Mind Games, and most of all, Harry Nilsson’s Pussy Cats (particularly his throat-shredding take on Jimmy Cliff’s Many Rivers To Cross). Over its nine-minutes-plus length, just when you think it can’t get any bigger or go any higher, it soars over the top of the top with strings, choir, wailing sax and Phil Spector-esque grandiosity, before finally subsiding into eerie high register violins.
Mahashmashana’s grand orchestral designs echo Father John Misty’s previous album, the classic Hollywood songbook arrangements of 2022’s Chloë And The Next 20th Century overseen by Drew Erickson, who notably co-produces this record. Here they dramatically return in the swooping cellos and sawing violins of Being You and elegantly creep around the big band croon of Summer’s Gone. Erickson’s association with Lana Del Rey (since 2021’s Blue Banisters) is significant, too. Since Misty appeared in Del Rey’s 2016 video for Freak, and she returned the favour by covering Chloë’s Buddy’s Rendezvous, the two have increasingly shared stylistic ground, in blurring the modern and old-timey in noir tales of a corrupted California.
It’s a theme that FJM returns to here in the similarly expansive, near-seven-minute Screamland. Vividly illustrated by a phone-shot video depicting Lynchian night drive scenes and forks of lightning striking Los Angeles, it depicts a city where “everyone is perfect beneath their robes” and offers the none more Hollywood mantra “stay young/get numb/keep dreaming”. Sonically, it employs quiet/loud dynamics that jump cut between tender verses and crushing electronic choruses to convey its sense of urban claustrophobia.
Another recurring theme is a shifting sense of identity, befitting someone who moved from Rockville to New York and then escaped to Seattle where he played drums for Fleet Foxes and released a series of unspectacular, Damien Jurado-inspired acoustic albums as J. Tillman, before experiencing a magic mushroom-shaped epiphany enroute to LA that resulted in his transformation into Father John Misty. In Being You, over dreamy electric piano and fat ’70s drums, he now sounds trapped inside this assumed persona, likening it to “a perfect parody I can barely do”.
Along the way, we get a couple of more acute freakouts. Comically, amid the Roxy Music-ish melange of stomp and sax in She Cleans Up, he suffers the horrors after dreaming about a film that he can’t quite remember the name of, apart from the fact that it involves Scarlett Johansson driving “the Scottish countryside inside of a white van” (as a male-abducting alien in Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 head-melter, Under The Skin).
Elsewhere, Misty’s gift for arch self-mythology returns in Josh Tillman And The Accidental Overdose. Detailing an ill-advised assignation, whether real or imagined, it begins with the woman in question slipping Astral Weeks onto the turntable, winking at the singer and declaring, “I love jazz.” Things quickly take a turn for the surreal as he views her interior décor and notes that “her clown portraits spoke to me”, as if he’s seeing himself in a series of mirrors. The standout line comes with his admission that “around this time, I publicly/Was treating acid with anxiety/I was unwell”. During the Pure Comedy era, Tillman was indeed espousing the wonders of microdosing, but it’s the kind of funny ha ha/funny peculiar statement in which he specialises, while also revealing his inner struggles. The fact that the song is dressed up in an appealingly slinky arrangement, replete with bursts of staccato strings (Serge Gainsbourg via ’71 Lennon’s Flux Fiddlers), renders it all the more potent.
The showstopping Mental Health goes even further, opening like an easy listening Carpenters ballad, before a ghostly choir enter the picture and it builds, bit by bit, to a showstopping bells and whistles finish. Identity here is hauntingly described as “your milk white shadow” as Tillman professes that a little instability is good “for the true endeavour of your soul”, being playful with a heavy subject yet at the same altogether knowing. Essentially, he’s casting himself here as a cracked, if sagacious lounge crooner. Or a neurodiverse Sinatra absolutely bent on doing it My Way.
Throughout, there are fleeting glimpses of future Misty. In Summer’s Gone, he wryly envisages himself four decades hence as “a lecherous old windbag” whose old shirts no longer fit his bulging frame. Referencing the title of his 2012 FJM debut, Fear Fun, as he drives around a Los Angeles that he no longer recognises, he wistfully notes that for this former Christian renegade, “there’s no fun left to fear”.
Closer in the timeline, but no less vivid, is I Guess Time Just Makes Fools Of Us All, a song that in the great Dylan tradition circles back to its title through intricate, tangled verses depicting kings and fools and wars (and the capricious nature of the record industry) over an in-the-pocket disco groove. By the end, he’s escaped to Las Vegas, to perform his “greatest hits”. Which is where we leave him for now, with another great, mind-bending, soul-baring, melodically rich album to his name: a singer tap dancing on the very edge.
Mahashmashana is out now on Bella Union.
LISTEN/BUY: Spotify | Apple Music | Amazon | HMV| Rough Trade
Tracklisting:
Mahashmashana
She Cleans Up
Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose
Mental Health
Screamland
Being You
I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All
Summer's Gone
Photo: Ward & Kweskin
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