Father John Misty ‘Mahashmashana’ Review: A Droll Commemoration of Modern Life

The album lacks the clarity of the musician's best work but still feels like a return to form.

Father John Misty, Mahashmashana
Photo: Ward & Kweskin

Father John Misty is a withering social commentator who casts wry aspersions on the ludicrousness of modern life, often depicted in funhouse proportions with the aid of winkingly florid arrangements. Though he’s more than eager to implicate himself in this clown show of a world—as on “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment,” from 2015’s I Love You, Honeybear, where he proves lecherous and desperate enough to hook up with an pseud whom he spends the entire song excoriating—Josh Tillman’s best writing is more observational than introspective.

Tillman the cultural satirist and Tillman the gonzo diarist are both present and accounted for on Mahashmashana, and he often seems intent on reconciling the two. At times, he succeeds, like with “Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose,” on which he pokes fun at both himself—“Around this time I publicly/Was treating acid with anxiety”—and the “Pynchon yuppie” and “tacit fascists” that he encounters. His raw, throaty delivery on this track suggests the depths of a substance-fueled torment, while the song’s jaunty piano blues lick imbues it with a buoyancy that reminds you of just how entertaining Tillman can be, even when confronting demons.

Elsewhere, though, Tillman seems as lost in his own head as ever, reeling off lengthy, oblique verses that can be difficult to parse. There’s a hint as to his general intent in the album’s title, a Sanskrit word for “great cremation ground,” and the opening title track, a gaudy, self-indulgent funeral song—or, as Tillman puts it, a “corpse dance”—for a gaudy, self-indulgent age. Opening with a maudlin swell of strings and brass, the song billows out into a nine-plus-minute barrage of sax solos and bellowed choruses that can best be described as “Phil Spector goes Vegas.”

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Though the album may lack the thematic clarity of Tillman’s best work, it still feels like a return to form for Tillman. In particular, after the more subdued music that he’s made in recent years, Mahashmashana frequently recalls the grandiloquence and showmanship, if not the biting and incisive didacticism, of I Love You, Honeybear and 2017’s Pure Comedy.

In fact, “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All” is somehow even more ridiculous and equally within Tillman’s idiosyncratic wheelhouse. It turns out that eight-and-a-half minutes of jokey white-bred funk is the perfect vehicle for a diatribe about losing one’s edge, the shallow, unfulfilled promises of fame, and how inspiration inevitably becomes co-opted by crass commercialism. None of which, for all his indignity, Tillman professes to be immune from: “That’s where you’ll find me: in Las Vegas, doing my greatest hits,” he sings.

For all the flamboyance and giddy irony on display throughout Mahashmashana, though, Tillman remains plagued by his darkest thoughts. On the dry, quavering verses of “Screamland,” he ponders the futility of humanity’s various methods of escaping the bleakness of reality: religion, drugs, even plain old optimism. His entreaties to “Stay young, get numb, keep dreaming” over staticky blasts of noise—sculpted, in part, by Low’s Alan Sparhawk on guitar—are blackly sarcastic to an almost unfathomable degree.

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By comparison, album closer “Summer’s Gone,” which revives the swooning Old Hollywood-style orchestration that Tillman experimented with on 2022’s Chlo and the Next 20th Century, is pretty and romantic. But the funerary leanings of the title track are present here, too, complete with sly self-references: “There’s no fun left to fear,” the singer croons, turning the title of 2012’s Fear Fun on its head. Maybe that’s just another song about the bitter taste of aging and Tillman is prepared to endure “40 more years left ahead.” Or maybe he’s ready to toss Father John Misty on the pyre. Unless, of course, he gets that call from Vegas.

Score: 
 Label: Sub Pop  Release Date: November 22, 2024  Buy: Amazon

Jeremy Winograd

Jeremy Winograd studied music and writing at Bennington College, where he did his senior thesis on Drive-By Truckers. He has written for Rolling Stone and Time Out New York. He and his wife met on a White Stripes message board.

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