On Mahashmashana, Father John Misty Blends Sonic Range and a Big-Picture View

With his new album, Mahashmashana, Josh Tillman, a.k.a. Father John Misty, backburners the vintage ambiance of his last album, 2022’s Chloë and the Next 20th Century. Instead, Misty revisits the social commentary and reflections on loss that pervaded 2017’s Pure Comedy and 2018’s God’s Favorite Customer. Throughout his latest project, the versatile singer and agile lyricist interweaves folk-rock, lounge, dance, big-band, and glam elements, reaffirming his status as a distinct stylist. Lyrically, he offers some of his most heartrending and stoic takes on human life and the ways of the world.

The word mahashmashana, for which the album is named, can be translated from the Sanskrit as “great cremation ground.” Indeed, the album brims with references to death and impermanence. Tillman also fleshes out a big-picture view that was hinted at with earlier work, addressing the way in which individual lives are part of sublime cycles, unfolding within the context of archetypal patterns. He meets the drama of aging with notable aplomb, and faces suffering with a newfound, albeit often sarcastic, forbearance.

On the dance-y and horn-led “I Guess Time Makes Fools of Us All,” Tillman is at his most Kafkaesque when he sings, “Our naked bodies go on trial  / just for laughing at the joke.” He channels a zoomed-out Allen Ginsberg when he declares, “The great-ish minds of my generation …,” going on to depict the corrosive effects of intergenerational conditioning. And he inverts biblical and romantic metaphors when he concludes, “The groom is a liar and the bride is a shill.” With this track, and the sequence as a whole, Tillman plays both Hamlet and his jester, a philosopher and satirist, a doomsdayer and Zen poet.

On the string-and-percussion-heavy “Screamland,” Tillman offers a bleak assessment of relational tendencies: “How long can you love someone for the weakness they conceal?” Adding “Stay young / get numb,” with the song’s cynical chorus. “Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose” is a similarly dour yet lounge-y take that brings to mind two parts Harry Nilsson circa “Everybody’s Talkin’,” mixed with one part “Ballad of a Thin Man”-era Bob Dylan. As the song unfolds, it conjures the discomfort of realizing that what you have long held as sacred may be an illusion.

The title song is a 9-plus minute epic, undergirded by schmaltzy strings and a straightforward percussion part. Simultaneously, however, Tillman eloquently describes a culture plunging into decadence (“The courtiers have arrived in nail polish”), the social-media-stoked intersection of love, commerce, and pornography (“Obscene as a lick / love’s the birthright of young people”), and the establishment of “alternate facts” as reality (“A perfect lie can live forever / the truth don’t fare as well”). Again we wonder, is Tillman a visiting lecturer or a Las Vegas ringmaster? Does he empathize with the plight of most humans or is he indulging in high mockery?

The album’s closer “Summer’s Gone” is an aptly nostalgic commentary on growing up (“against your will comes wisdom”) and surrendering various biases, preferences, and entitlements. Tillman is at his most clear-eyed as he assesses the world and himself. Disappointment and inconsequentiality, he reminds us, have always been and will always be integral to the human story. With Mahashmashana, he reiterates history’s salient teachings: our yearnings, triumphs, and anguish are an incidental part of the universe’s unfolding.

Father John Misty’s Mahashmashana will be released Nov. 22 on Sub Pop / Bella Union.