“Who the folks is Father John Misty?” NME requested again in 2017. It was a good query. Everybody knew by then that the singer-songwriter was a terminally on-line folkie – not the one contradiction about him – who’d adopted an album of archly ironic love songs (2015’s ‘I Love You, Honeybear’) with a sprawling opus in regards to the sheer insanity of life within the twenty first Century (‘Pure Comedy’). However who was he actually?
An infamously agonising 6 Music interview had come no nearer to uncovering the person behind the moniker, who was born Joshua Tillman however insisted that Father John Misty was not a personality. If the reply to NME’s query lies someplace within the liminal area between the earnest Tillman and the cynical Misty, the music has at all times been nakedly bold and wealthy with emotion. On his final album, 2022’s ‘Chloë and the Subsequent twentieth Century’, he threw his palms up on the trendy world and retreated self-consciously into retro large band pastiche.
You’d suppose that capitulation may result in a useless finish, however ‘Mahashmashana’ finds Misty liberated from the obsession with modern popular culture that he’s grappled with since 2012’s ‘Concern Enjoyable’. This may be associated to his latest assertion that he’s skilled “a couple of non-elective ego deaths, the place the self is receding” – together with parenthood. So the gently psychedelic new report is called after a Sanskrit phrase which means “nice cremation floor”, its opening title observe a string-laden epic ballad that breaks the nine-minute mark with surreal poetry hinting at “the subsequent common daybreak”. You may solely conclude it’s snarky outdated Misty who’s been toasted.
In his place has risen an apparently honest engagement with spirituality that the phony Father solely affected. On the loungey ‘Josh Tillman and the Unintended Overdose’, he appears to replicate on his personal transient dalliance with superstar. He as soon as revealed that he was “utterly fucked up” in that 6 Music interview, and right here portrays one other encounter, which leads him to admit: “Round this time, I publicly / Was treating acid with anxiousness / I used to be unwell.”
Contrasting with this recollection, there’s a peacefulness to ‘Mahashmashana’, the tone grounded even when its creator veers into psych-rock (the pounding ‘She Cleans Up’) and strutting funk (‘I Guess Time Makes Fools of Us All’). Half of its eight tracks spool on for greater than six minutes and he’s not minded, nowadays, to clarify them in interviews or on social media. As an alternative he’s bowed out from the highlight to supply a report that tunes into love, ageing and the seek for which means with out the compulsion for a punchline or wry apart.
Consequently, the plush ‘Mahashmashana’ doesn’t fairly mainline the zeitgeist in the identical method that ‘Honeybear’ and ‘Pure Comedy’ did. Then once more, there’s one thing to be mentioned, in 2024, for logging off in favour of self-reflection. On the swooning ‘Psychological Well being’, Misty rejects the hive thoughts, concluding that his personal specific “madness” is “indispensable”. Whoever the folks he’s beneath that beard, the nice Father can’t assist however share phrases of knowledge.
Particulars
- Launch date: November 22, 2024
- File label: Bella Union
