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“Mahashmashana” is a Sanskrit phrase that means “nice cremation floor”. May that imply that is Josh Tillman’s final album as Father John Misty? He’s already buried the J Tillman alter-ego, below which he launched his first eight, folkier albums. That is his sixth because the sly, Scott Walker-indebted preacher and it comes within the wake of this summer season’s Greatish Hits launch, capping the profession arc that – he jokes right here – made him “simply the least-famous artist” to show down the duvet of Rolling Stone.
Whether or not or not that is the tip for Tillman as FJM, Mahashmashana actually finds him swilling round huge queasy questions of mortality and identification. The file opens with the title observe, an enormous bombastic swoon of Seventies-style strings’n’sax-backed smooth rock, which takes the preparations of 2022’s Chloë and the Subsequent twentieth Century up a notch.
It’s a story that shifts out and in of focus, seemingly a few singer realising that in “the following common daybreak” he “gained’t must do the corpse dance… gained’t must do the one concerning the nation’s boyfriend.” Tillman’s combo of straight-shooting vocal with these head-spinning sonic backdrops could make him sound marvellously like Glen Campbell singing Jimmy Webb’s classic1968 “Witchita Lineman”. He additionally dials immediately into that tune’s tone of triumph and despair, though he ends on a darker observe with the strings screeching upwards and off the street within the closing bars.
Tillman hits a brand new groove that’s half junkyard Tom Waits, half T Rex swagger on “She Cleans Up”. The organ riff comes armed with dustbin lid percussion and raucous graffiti scrawls of guitar and sax. The near-rapped vocals are punched as via a megaphone: it’s an enormous previous snarl towards a world whose stacked techniques Tillman claims to see via.
He winks at self-obsession on the slinky “Josh Tillman and the Unintended Overdose”, which describes an evening that finally ends up on the residence of a girl who “placed on Astral Weeks/ mentioned ‘I really like jazz’”. As a string part slides off the melody like molten wax, our hero shambles via the tune like a twenty first century model of The Huge Lebowski’s Dude, overhearing conversations about incels, passing “Pynchon yuppies” and consuming ice cream.
Single “Time Makes Fools of Us All” has a terrifically free and funky steering wheel-tapper of a pulse. “Screamland” provides a distorted smudge to the reverb whereas flutes and a celestial choir float across the easy-listening sway of “Psychological Well being” (which sounds an increasing number of like “psychological hell” with each repetition). “Summer season’s Gone” channels the piano and double bass of classic Broadway.
The melodies are attractive and the lyrics include that particular umami of being exact but elusive. If there’s a nagging flaw right here, it’s that FJM can generally sound extra like a cocktail of his impeccably cool influences, reasonably than a person making his personal distinctive sound. However at others – to adapt one in every of The Dude’s greatest strains – he’s the rug that actually ties the room collectively.
It gained’t actually matter if Tillman kills the “FJM” moniker at this level. In a 2015 interview with The Impartial, he waved away the concept that his pseudonyms imply his work isn’t private: “The issue I’ve with alter-ego is that it implies that it’s not actual, you realize?” he mentioned.
“That the lyrics aren’t actual and that I didn’t actually have these experiences and that’s the best insult to me. It’s like, dude, use your vital thoughts. Ignore the flashing lights of the title and take heed to the f***ing tunes and inform me that this isn’t about an actual particular person.”
So even when that is an elegy for FJM, it’s a reasonably great one. I’ll sit up for Tillman’s subsequent incarnation.
