Father John Misty – Mahashmashana Review

To describe Josh Tillman as an enigma hardly scratches the surface. After a modest start recording under his own name he joined Fleet Foxes, before quitting acrimoniously just after the release of their second album Helplessness Blues. Launching a solo career under the guise of Father John Misty, his album of baroque pop I Love You, Honeybear scrambled unexpectedly into many of 2015’s end of year polls, revealing him as a songer-songwriter with a rare gift for observation.

Perhaps because of, or in spite of this, the subsequent decade has been punctuated with triumphs and missteps. In the former column his previous outing Chloë And The Next 20th Century was a series of almost Vaudevillian musical sketches, but delivered with a panache that turned his frequently explored tendency for self indulgence on it’s head.

Mahashmashana – literal translation from Sanskrit being ‘great cremation ground’ – is more layered but even grander in it’s theatrical design, with the titular opening track running to over nine minutes. On it Tillman/Misty interlock and pass in and out of each other, a costume change best illustrated via Josh Tillman And The Accidental Dose. This melding of personalities reaches a wonderful peak on the urbane disco of I Guess Time Just Makes a Fool Of Us All but especially with Screamland, a swipe at Los Angeles that soars on electronic pulses.

Josh Tillman’s an enigma, but Mahashmashana is a record only an elite tier of artists could even hope to pull off.

You can read a full review here.