Three songs into his latest louche masterwork, Josh Tillman, aka Father John Misty, comes up with a line that, inadvertently or not, sums up his shtick. “She put on Astral Weeks and said, ‘I love jazz,’” he sings on Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose, which sets Serge Gainsbourg-style orchestral funk against a tale of hooking up with a stranger, only to suffer an acid freakout and end up wandering the streets. It’s all in there: the psychedelic drugs, the little dig at a woman who doesn’t know her Van Morrison from her Miles Davis, a touch of seediness, a suggestion of inner turmoil beneath the smooth veneer. So it goes for an artist who is nothing if not unique, combining pastiche with originality and a healthy dose of humour.
The Los Angeles singer-songwriter created a fantastical version of himself as Father John Misty, a Randy Newman for the age of phone addiction, but his latest album digs into deeper issues. “I wanna go where everybody is perfect beneath their robes,” he sings on Screamland, a fraught seven-minute string explosion on which he dreams of a potential heaven. Tillman grew up in an evangelical household in Maryland before losing his faith, so you can see why he might still feel the need for something to believe in.
He was also told that the depression he went through as a boy was a result of allowing demons into his life. Now, on Mental Health, he mocks the kind of modern platitudes that ultimately suggest the same thing: if you’re psychologically disturbed, it’s your fault. “No one knows you like yourself,” he croons over music so lush and easy it could play in the background while doctors carry out a lobotomy.
The Father John Misty persona was born of experience. Tillman spent much of the Noughties playing drums for the sensitive folk-rockers Fleet Foxes while releasing earnest, underwhelming acoustic albums under his own name. He reinvented himself in 2012 after, he claims, a magic mushroom-inspired revelation, which, whether true or not, is the perfect origin story.
From there he made a series of grandiose albums that offered an unshaven, slightly malodorous mirror image to his friend Lana Del Rey’s doomed LA glamour, while also hinting at messianic tendencies. The latter come to the fore on the title song to Mahashmashana (Sanskrit for “great cremation ground”), a movie theme-style epic about the destruction of the old world and the birth of the new. You cannot help but suspect that Tillman wrote it while picturing himself, probably in a robe, leading the faithful towards the universal dawn.
It would all be a bit silly if he didn’t regularly burst the bubble of his own importance. The album ends with Summer’s Gone, a delightfully smooth piece of romantic jazz in which he imagines himself years from now, driving around Los Angeles, looking at the girls, just another “lecherous old windbag”. So there was no apocalypse, no new dawn, just the rather more common problem of growing old and getting in the way. It’s really quite moving. (Bella Union)
★★★★☆
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