Father John Misty - "Mahashmashanal" : his new album

Josh Tillman's albums, God's Favorite Customer and Chloè And The Next 20th Century, have been a mix of stripped-back and lush orchestration, but have not quite hit the right balance. Chloè, a series of hallucinations, is a Father John Misty concept set against a 1950s Hollywood orchestration backdrop. Mahashmashanal, this album, is a set of beautiful, sometimes frustrating songs about ending and death. 

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 Chloè 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 Ί 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 emphasize 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 Johansson 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”.