Time won't make a fool of Father John Misty on the nihilistic but never despairing Mahashmashana
Mahashmashana—taken from the Sanskrit word for "great cremation ground"—may be Josh Tillman's most confident release yet.
Image: Jagjaguwar
The world as we know it may be ending, but Father John Misty is feeling fine. He didn’t much like the world as it was anyway; he made that perfectly clear on the dozens of musings ranging from pensively existential (“I Went To The Store One Day“) to wholly nihilistic (“Total Entertainment Forever” et. al.) that made up the majority of his past five albums. But now, “after a decade being born, Josh Tillman (the bearded poet behind the FJM moniker) is finally dying,” as he wrote in the album notes accompanying his latest and most confident release thus far, Mahashmashana. For Tillman, the line between life and death has always been a bit fuzzy—living is an endless parade of psychological papercuts, and “time just makes fools of us all,” as he sings on the record’s penultimate track. But now, in choosing to stare headlong into the void, Tillman has finally freed himself from that absurd and endless cycle. What is there left to do but dance and sing with the corpses left behind?
The folk rocker has long been fascinated with the miasma of modern life. “Eventually the dying man takes his final breath/But first checks his news feed to see what he’s ’bout to miss,” he sang on “Ballad Of The Dying Man” back in 2017. Unlike his last release, 2022’s curious Chloë And The Next 20th Century, a revue of “alternate-timeline American-songbook tunes” (according to the liner notes) about all our quotidian errs, Mahashmashana sees Tillman take a bird’s eye—or, one could argue, god’s eye—view on the whole mess. The songwriter has clearly latched onto some multi-denominational form of spirituality, one that’s allowed him to make tentative peace with the righteous cynicism that plagued him on previous outings like God’s Favorite Customer and Pure Comedy. This album and its opening track both take their name from the Sanskrit word for “great cremation ground” or “all things going thither,” as he explains in a press note. But while the people—the ones still being born—go to this anonymous Asphodel field, Father John Misty is living up to his name, positioning himself as a sort of unbiased preacher of the great beyond.
Don’t take this passivity for indifference. Tillman’s aphorisms and X-acto knife turns of phrase are as sharp here as they’ve ever been. In the title track, he diagnoses a party dressing in “donor class panache,” and later name drops “Pynchon yuppies,” the “panopticon,” and even his own past work, singing “There’s no fun left to fear but/To Georgie it’s still Babylon.” What other songster out there could so gracefully stuff “the Anthropocene, an amnesiac, [and] a himbo Ken doll” into one passage, as Tillman does in “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools Of Us All”?