We all die, it's inevitable, but not before time has screwed us over. You are born and from that moment, even if you lead a full and crazy life, you start to die. On the new album Mahashmashana Father John Misty doesn't try to make sense of it all, but puts to music his fascination with that enormous enigma to which there is only one answer.
The title is a word that in Sanskrit means “large cremation ground”. “It all ends there,” says Josh Tillman in the album's press notes. The songs are often about the end, and yet Mahashmashana it is not dark or gloomy. Instead, it is full of Tillman's trademark cryptic wit and reflections. “The engine of civilization / Coffee and cigarettes / I still haven't found a better way to rebel,” he sings in Mental Health. The title track opens with the lines “His body is a Gelson's / His soul, a fallen star”, the luxury supermarket chain in Los Angeles gives the opportunity for a reflection on human nature.
If the previous one Chloe and the Next 20th Century it was a trippy reinterpretation of old Hollywood and the Great American Songbook, Mahashmashana marks the return to the wide-ranging orchestral pop-rock that is very 70s and which has always characterized Father John Misty. The songs almost all exceed five minutes, which allows Tillman and co-producer and arranger Drew Erickson to use a broad palette of tones and nuances. She Cleans Up it's a solid and loud half garage rock, in I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All moves in a vast landscape in which there is disco music, Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose enchants with a delicate soul groove, and then places hits of strings.
The deviation from the norm, in terms of sound, is Screamlandwhere an evocative silence transforms into a crescendo complete with a synth explosion, almost Coldplay-style. And Tillman's trademark lyricism (“Stabbing the ashtray as if it might reveal the truth / As if it might finally confess who else you're almost faithful to”) leads to one of his most direct refrains: “Stay young / Turn off your brain / Keep on dream / Screamland”. Works? It does not work? Maybe it's simply a matter of taste or maybe it depends on the mood of the day. Tillman certainly has a tendency to embark on big projects.
In the penultimate piece I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All Tillman tells the most intriguing and complex story about how we all live our lives, but also how he lived his, as a showman. He jokes about the time he refused to end up on the cover of Rolling Stone (yes, that happened), gets career advice from a rattlesnake (“Hey, I can make you sell a million records / But you understand that your image could use a fix”) and dreams of a future where he'll end up in Las Vegas reeling off his hits.
All this, Tillman seems to say, is just part of the staging of one giant cosmic joke. The answer lies in the piece with which the album ends, Summer's Gone. It's a meditation on growing old as the world changes and the futility of pretending nothing happened. Tillman prefers to follow a simple path, full of pleasure and pain, which leads towards a sort of transcendence: “You eat a peach / Or you skin your knee / And time doesn't touch me”.
From Rolling Stone US.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
