By my decade-spanning brushes with his music, he should add in quite funny and often humorless. It’s hard to keep a consistent authorial tone when the world you love and live within is crumbling in a tragically ironic, comedic display. Then again, glimmers of hope and various lights at the ends of emotional tunnels pepper his discography just like his “father’s depression” salts and burns it.
By my money, no artist funnels the joys of life (romance, hope, concept albums) into the soulless destitution of trying to attain those joys like Tillman. And Mahashmashana bridges his widest gap yet.
While you can’t know the inner machinations of an artist’s mind just from their work, Tillman or someone in his circle is surely combing through each piece written on Mahashmashana just to see if a spelling mistake occurs when writing out its title; the joke’s on you, I am Ctrl+V-ing it. In every other instance, this record makes a fool of its audience, this pretentious, controversy-hungry collection of nihilistic poli-sci majors that I fall into 3 of the above 4 descriptors of; this is a record of patient, sojourning hope, so leave your adolescence at the door.
There are a half-dozen emotions you could pinpoint catching
a joyride on the world's-end-express of this record that Tillman’s
previous work would scoff at, at least to the inattentive listener. For
as jaded and satirical as his writing purports himself to be, he’s a
romantic soul leaping toward the rainbow connection by each closing
number. The tracklist is befit with steadfast piano ballads,
interspersed with standout collaborators widening Tillman’s artistic
palette. I accused “She Cleans Up” of being a Viagra Boys dupe until its
writing credits were revealed like a Maury paternity test; congrats, it
has authenticity now.
The opener and title track of the record is 10 minutes of
constantly elevating orchestral drones and deafening balladry; the peaks
of noise it hits are by-and-large Tillman’s finest brush with true
bliss and majesty in his discography. It’s one of the finest
depictions of an ascension put to tape, with the rest of the tracklist
more or less matching the disappointment of living in a strictly doomed and imperfect reality. That is to stay, before the penultimate song of
the record decides its sister tracks are bringing down its vibe before
a sweltering disco groove heralds in the closest example society will
get of Father John Bee Gees before the inferno. Maybe it’s the sign of a
collapsing regime that its artists start going for broke like they used
to.
I will now don my journalistic dunce cap by admitting I had partially written off Tilman after the mid-paced Chloe & the Next 20th Century. It
felt like the project had already hit its rapturous peaks and would
live on in the stately lounges its record evoked. But then Mahashmashana has
to reel us back in, right at the political apex of when we’d need him
the most. Here rests my argument that Tillman is a
strength-of-schedule-merchant with global misery. The lower we get, the
higher he must climb. Don’t worry about the romance bringing him down,
he can beat enlightenment from just about anything.
