Father John Misty: Mahāśmaśāna (digital outlets)

The first three singles released in advance of this new album by Josh Tillman (Father John Misty) were so majestic they seemed to herald something special on his sixth album Mahāśmaśāna, which apparently means “the great cremation ground” in Sanskrit.

There was the heroic, seven minute Screamland (with Low's Alan Sparhawk on guitar) which offered “and you could say that no one here really believes
In the future, in perfection, that things aren't what they seem” and a refrain of “stay young, get numb, keep dreaming”.

Then came the excellent, eight minute-plus, hip-swaying and imagery-filled country-rock I Guess Time Makes Fools of Us All which somehow beckons you to the dancefloor in a disco.

She Cleans Up was a propulsive, wordy, surreal rocker which kisses the ring of Dylan 1965/Costello 1977 for more shaggy dog poppy folk-rock.

Each of these was a beautifully crafted discrete world but linked by his authoritative vocals and strings.

The album opens with a huge statement: the nine minute-plus, orchestrated title track which swells to a Spector-like ascendance: “A perfect lie can live forever, the truth don't fare as well. It isn't perched on lips mid-laughter, it ain't the kind of thing you tell”.

It's sentient earnestness is taken down a peg by She Cleans UP which opens with a vision Mary Magdalene who says “no one's fucking with my baby Lord” and then “what is the one about the female alien? Scarlett drives the countryside inside a white van. I dreamt about it last night and it did my whole day in under the something, man. I'm never gonna touch that shit again”.

That surreal vision gets melded into the musingly self-mythologising Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose which spins out a strange trip from a girl putting on Astral Weeks, a publicist and a celibate talking politics, a Pynchon yuppie, a chorus of "you're in no shape” and then admitting “I saw something I shouldn't see, the awful truth, bare reality” and “I realized that I lost my mind, I ate an ice cream, dazed in the street. bBut it never tasted quite as sweet again”.

Such is the acid trip revelation and it comes with often alarming sweeps of orchestration, as befits a man who last year sang Scott Walker songs with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Tillman's musical vision is as broad as Walker's (check the final songs, the lush Summer's Gone), if not quite as disturbing as late period Scott.

Summer's Gone

 

And on Mental Health with lovely and sympathetic orchestration (“identity your milk white shadow just tries something that you wouldn't do. And it's always one step ahead of you”) addresses something he's thought a lot about: “This dream we're born inside feels awful real sometimes, but it's all in your mind.”

An extraordinary, exceptional and multi-layered album chock full of ideas, contradictions, self-analysis, broad observations and cracking tunes.

The final words are "and time can't touch me". 

Essential.

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here.