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Father John Misty: Mahashmashana review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week
The singer-songwriter sticks to apocalyptic first principles on his sixth album, couching contemporary chaos in soaring ballads and discofied yacht rock
There will be barbed drawings of human relations, bleakly funny ruminations on ageing, self-lacerating reflections on his own music and career, stuff about Los Angeles, Tillman’s adopted home town, and, frequently, a lurid microcosm of all that’s wrong with the world. Indeed, it ticks quite a lot of them over the course of the opening title track, which sets a melody that evokes FJM’s most enduring musical touchstone, early 70s Elton John, to an arrangement that recalls the overripe Phil Spector production of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. But you’d have a harder time arguing that he’s not a fantastic writer in both terms of melody – all nine tracks bear a tune that’s both beautiful and beautifully constructed – and the scope of his musical ambitions: the album nimbly leaps from Screamland’s white-knuckle take on electronic pop, strafed with the distorted guitar of Low’s Alan Sparhawk, to the sublime Great American Songbook pastiche of Summer’s Gone; from the gently discofied yacht rock of I Guess Time Makes Fools of Us All to Mental Health, which arrives drenched in strings and cooing, wordless female vocals redolent of late 50s/early 60s ballads and film soundtracks.
Or read this on The Guardian
