If Mahashmashana is an elegy for Father John Misty, it’s rather a wonderful one
“Mahashmashana” is a Sanskrit word meaning “great cremation ground”. Could that mean this is Josh Tillman’s last album as Father John Misty (FJM)? He’s already buried the J Tillman alter-ego, under which he released his first eight, folkier albums. This is his sixth as the sly, Scott Walker-indebted preacher and it comes in the wake of this summer’s Greatish Hits: I Followed My Dreams and My Dreams Said to Crawl, capping the career arc that – he jokes here – made him “easily the least-famous artist” to turn down the cover of Rolling Stone.
Whether or not this is the end for Tillman as FJM, Mahashmashana certainly finds him swilling around big queasy questions of mortality and identity. The record opens with the title track, a big bombastic swoon of Seventies-style strings’n’sax-backed soft rock, which takes the arrangements of 2022’s Chloë and the Next 20th Century up a notch.
It’s a tale that shifts in and out of focus, seemingly about a singer realising that in “the next universal dawn” he “won’t have to do the corpse dance… the one about the country’s boyfriend”. Tillman’s combo of straight-shooting vocals with these head-spinning sonic backdrops can make him sound marvellously like Glen Campbell singing Jimmy Webb’s classic 1968 “Wichita Lineman”. He also dials directly into that song’s tone of triumph and despair, although he ends on a darker note with the strings screeching upwards and off the road in the final bars.
Tillman hits a new groove that’s part junkyard Tom Waits, part 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 through a megaphone: it’s a big old snarl against a world whose stacked systems Tillman claims to see through.
He winks at self-obsession on the slinky “Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose”, which describes a night that ends up at the home of a woman who “put on Astral Weeks/ said ‘I love jazz’”. As a string section slides off the melody like molten wax, our hero shambles through the song like a 21st-century version of The Big Lebowski’s Dude, overhearing conversations about incels, passing “Pynchon yuppies” and eating ice cream.
Single “Time Makes Fools of Us All” has a terrifically loose and funky steering wheel-tapper of a pulse. “Screamland” offers a distorted smudge to the reverb while flutes and a celestial choir float around the easy-listening sway of “Mental Health” (which sounds more and more like “mental hell” with every repetition). “Summer’s Gone” channels the piano and double bass of vintage Broadway.
The melodies are gorgeous and the lyrics come with that special umami of being precise yet elusive. If there’s a nagging flaw here, it’s that FJM can sometimes sound more like a cocktail of his impeccably cool influences, rather than a man making his own distinctive sound. But at others – to adapt one of The Dude’s best lines – he’s the rug that really ties the room together.
It won’t really matter if Tillman kills the “FJM” moniker at this point. In a 2015 interview with The Independent, he waved away the idea that his pseudonyms mean his work isn’t personal: “The problem I have with alter-ego is that it implies that it’s not real, you know?” he said.
“That the lyrics aren’t real and that I didn’t really have these experiences and that’s the greatest insult to me. It’s like, dude, use your critical mind. Ignore the flashing lights of the name and listen to the f***ing tunes and tell me that this is not about a real person.”
So even if this is an elegy for FJM, it’s a rather wonderful one. I’ll look forward to Tillman’s next incarnation.
