Father John Misty – Mahashmashana

Is this the end for our plucky hero Josh Tillman? Since Father John Misty’s era-skewering classic Pure Comedy, Tillman has trampolined between stripped-back (God’s Favorite Customer) and lush orchestration (Chloë And The Next 20^th Century), without quite nailing the landing either time. Both were good, often great, albums, but ones that seemed a little too in thrall to concept – concepts that Tillman didn’t explain to anybody as he has largely refrained from doing interviews for the past six years.

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That’s a shame, as Tillman is smart, engaging and funny, more than capable of articulating his position and exploring the vulnerabilities he hides behind black humour. But it meant that nobody could really get a handle on the over-arching conceit of Chloe – a series of hallucinations that acted as sardonic commentary on the role of the love song in late-stage capitalism, set against a musical backdrop of ’50s Hollywood orchestration. That’s a very Father John Misty concept, one that only Josh Tillman could have come up with.

And what of Mahashmashana? This is another set of brilliant, beautiful, occasionally frustrating songs themed around ideas of ending and death. In Hindu tradition, a “shmashana” is where a body is brought for last rites and cremation. Maha means great in Sanskrit, making a mahashmashanaa large burial ground. In some terse notes for the album, we are told, via Dylan, that “after a decade being born, Josh Tillman is finally busy dying”. Is Tillman burying Father John Misty, or at least aspects of his music?

That seems unlikely, but it’s fun to explore. “It’s always the darkest right before the end”, Tillman sings on “Screamland”, a song that’s very dark indeed. It has classic Father John Misty themes of love, identity, faith and deception but a very different sound, with droning verses that give way to huge, heavily produced and compressed choruses. A more typical approach to the epic can be heard on the opening number, the title trick, a rich, languorous masterpiece that draws on early Scott Walker and Harry Nilsson without ever stepping into parody.

If there’s a musical theme to Mahashmashana, it’s as if Tillman was collating the best aspects of his previous albums in one place, piecing them together like an anthology or portmanteau or even a sort of sonic eulogy. “Mental Health” is a throwback to the Hollywood glamour of Chloë And The Next 20th Century. That means melodramatic strings that provide a deliberately absurd juxtaposition for the chorus of “mental health, mental health”. The song features one of the album’s many great couplets, a shot across the bows of detractors – “the one regret that’s really tough/Is knowing that I didn’t go far enough”.

On “Josh Tillman And The Accidental Dose”, he’s back to the self-referential wit of Pure Comedy and I Love You, Honeybear. The song is a dark and queasy romp with a classic opening line “She put on Astral Weeks/Said ‘I love jazz’ and winked at me”. There are fascists and publicists – as there often are in Tillman songs – and it ends with a sad ice cream. Musical flourishes emphasise the punchlines.

“Being You”, one of Tillman’s many songs about acting, has some of the sparse quality of God’s Favorite Customer, albeit with an electronic backdrop. The outstanding “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools Of Us All” – which originally appeared on 2024 compilation, Greatish Hits – is rambling Dylanesque that recalls Fear Fun’s freewheeling dark humour. Then there’s “Cleaning Up”, a taut funk-blues with Tillman rapping rather than crooning. “I know just how this thing ends”, he sings with nods to Scarlett Johansen in Under The Skin, Leonard Cohen and much else besides. Amusingly, The Viagra Boys get a co-writing credit. There’s another blink-and-miss-it reference to Under The Skin on “Being You”, and it can occasionally feel as if you are trapped in the sonic equivalent of a movie by Quentin Tarantino or the Coen Brothers, a hyperreal world built from original borrowings and head-spinning allusions. That can make it seem a bit like homework, a set of clever traps designed to trip the guileless.

But boy, can he sing. Tillman is an outstanding vocalist, a master of phrasing and inflection, whether he’s holding together the dramatic final bars of “Mahashmashana” against a backdrop of atomic sax, spitting bars on “She Cleans Up”, embracing the corn of “Mental Health” or crooning the happy-sad closing number “Summer’s Gone”. Sometimes his skill as a musician gets overshadowed by his lyrical brilliance, which might be why Tillman was eager to perform the songs of Scott Walker with the BBC orchestra at the Barbican in 2023. Before the show, he admitted he was worried that if the concert is release as a live album it will be subsumed by the Father John Misty brand that he has created. So maybe he’s ready for a change?

If he is, there’s no big reveal on Mahashmashana, but it’s interesting that the final track, “Summer’s Gone”, another song about endings, contains several references to “Fun Times In Babylon”, the first song on Fear Fun. That song ended with the immortal war cry “Look out Hollywood, here I come”, and “Summer’s Gone” delivers the sad reality, as the narrator, now “a lecherous old windbag”, drives around a city he no longer recognises and ponders what lies ahead. “Time can’t touch me”, he sings at the close, and you can’t tell that if that is a lament, a promise or a threat.

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