Another critic turned down this assignment because they just can’t stand him, but alas, Father John Misty is my own Roman Empire, crowding my thoughts with the music of civilization’s hubristic decline. And not a moment too soon: Josh Tillman’s sixth album under this moniker is a set of apocalyptic rockers where Jesus has gone AWOL and all the screws are coming loose. The mood swings are wilder, the logic more tangential; the songwriting might be the best it’s ever been. It’s called Mahashmashana, an anglicization of mahāśmaśāna, the Sanskrit word for cremation ground: the burning wasteland before the next life. Even playing the spiritual tourist, Misty’s compelled to point out we’re all headed to the same place.
The concept is an extension of 2022’s Chloë and the Next 20th Century, which closed with a turning karmic wheel and the command to “build your burial grounds on our burial grounds.” In any case he’s in his groove: The album is loosely divided between two familiar modes of FJM, the wild-eyed mid-to-uptempo numbers and the melodramatic ballads of despair. The main development is that this iteration of the narrator is well aware that if he’s not out of his mind, everyone else must be. “I publicly/Was treating acid with anxiety,” he sings at one point, deadpan. He deconstructs “Amazing Grace” (“What was found is lost”) and updates “Howl” for a cultural economy of Thiel-funded sellouts: “The great-ish minds of my generation/Gladly conscripted in the war.” The world is corrupted and the line between truth and fiction is thin as the one between this realm and the next. “A perfect lie can live forever,” he proclaims.
The scene’s bleak but it sounds fantastic—luxe, over the top. The title track oozes sax and Old Hollywood strings. “Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose” is soft rock for end times. All the best songs stretch toward seven minutes and beyond. A toast to decadent culture! The evident pleasure in the construction and writing of these songs is strong enough to justify lingering on this side of the veil. God forbid we have some fun with it, or rock out on “She Cleans Up,” the flatulent cowbell bruiser that dreams of opening on the Black Keys’ tour (hahaha—but doesn’t it make you feel a little mechanical bull-curious?). You want to dare him to start choogling, and then at the end of “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All,” he does. You might trace certain songs to past entries in the FJM catalog: “Time” for fans of Pure Comedy’s discursive social critique, “Accidental Dose” for those charmed by I Love You Honeybear’s arch self-mythology, a moment in “Summer’s Gone” that references Fear Fun. I get to call it a “career-spanning album”; he watches his life flash in front of his eyes.
In one of a scant few interviews in recent years, Tillman told Blackbird Spyplane, without going into detail, that becoming a father contributed to his experience of “ego deaths.” The psychoactives presumably weren’t helping, but on Mahashmashana, Misty channels solipsistic self-terror into a more universal sense of uncertainty, perhaps a pathological inability to reconcile the self in the so-called “post-truth” era. On “Being You” he sits down for a bad date with a mirror, musing that “in my memory there’s a show called the past,” as if it were never real. The colossally indulgent and tongue-in-cheek “Mental Health” presents a rogue’s gallery of arguments against the concept: Aren’t we just reductively claiming diagnoses as personal identifiers? Isn’t the paranoid crouch a pretty reasonable position to take, given the circumstances? Isn’t suffering necessary for art??? Chill out, he reminds, not unkindly: The panic is in your head.
Here’s the setup for Misty’s unlikely redemption in “Screamland,” a song whose towering wall of sound combines the terrible sweet pressure of Low with the pop hedonism of “Party in the U.S.A.” Those are the secular references, though: What those coy, silvery builds and big sing-along peaks really evoke is modern Christian rock. Misty’s last stand for optimism is a testimony to belief with the earnest chorus, “Love must find a way”; images of baptism, wine, and the stone of Jesus’ tomb; and a question that, once you hear it, appears to come not from a simp but from a supplicant: “How long can you love someone for the weakness they conceal?” He sounds not hopeful exactly, just faithful—like maybe Lana Del Rey invited him to church.
Father John Misty’s Christian era next? But I don’t care to speculate on Tillman’s personal beliefs, and in any case he seems the type to call himself “spiritual.” My nagging question about “Screamland” is this: Why does it end like that, so suddenly, blinking out like the power’s been cut? It’s not the last song, but albums don’t always operate in linear time anymore, and there’s the sense, in all of Misty’s recent output, that we’re living in the desperate final seconds of the doomsday clock. Listening to Mahashmashana, the image that recurs for me is the orchestra playing on the deck of the sinking Titanic. It’s brave to choose art, even when—especially when—you don’t have another choice. What are any of us supposed to do, turn back? When you reach the cremation ground, you have to go ahead on faith.
