Nine years after his breakthrough album I Love You, Honeybear turned Josh Tillman from a minor indie singer-songwriter (and the former drummer of Fleet Foxes) into a critical cause célèbre, most people with any interest know broadly what to expect from a new release under the Father John Misty name. There will be blackly comic depictions of existential angst and apocalyptic dread. Songs that suggest life in the 21st century is basically unbearable and that the world is irredeemably screwed will vie with fourth wall-breaking moments where Tillman confesses his own complicity in screwing up the world. There will be barbed drawings of human relations, bleakly funny ruminations on ageing, self-lacerating reflections on his own music and career, stuff about Los Angeles, Tillman’s adopted home town, and, frequently, a lurid microcosm of all that’s wrong with the world.
Suffice to say that Mahashmashana ticks all those boxes. Indeed, it ticks quite a lot of them over the course of the opening title track, which sets a melody that evokes FJM’s most enduring musical touchstone, early 70s Elton John, to an arrangement that recalls the overripe Phil Spector production of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. It takes its name from a Sanskrit world meaning “great cremation ground” and alternates between describing “the next universal dawn” breaking over a silent world, and a troubled relationship between a man whose body is metaphorically compared to a chain of southern Californian gourmet food markets and a woman whose soul is a “fallen star”. Modern-day life is “a scheme to enrich assholes”, Tillman avers, before poking his head through the fourth wall and taunting himself for his pomposity: “Such revelations,” he sings, with a parenthetical roll of the eyes, “which only singers can describe.”
