Crawling through time and living with the results: Father John Misty’s Mahashmashana
By NICK TAVARES
STATIC and FEEDBACK Editor
It’s not unlike seeing the man onstage, commanding a small army of musicians in a theater or a club, or traveling the lengths of the previous five albums in the current cannon, but there’s a feeling listening through this album, Mahashmasha, that seems impossible to shake:
Father John Misty can do and say just about anything he wants.
He can dismantle modern dogma and construct the most ornate sounds to carry that tune through the vinyl or the streaming kilobytes and into the listeners’ collective ears, and they can do what they want with the message from there. The effectiveness of that part, though, is certainly in question. That’s just not his to solve, necessarily.
He can look at our culture of deifying the nightmare personalities in charge of everything important and the pain and misery they gleefully cause and all the work necessary to sidestep this morass and how utterly disheartening this entire exercise can be, and set it all to a disco soundtrack. He can openly question the processes that have turned “Mental Health” into a buzzword for publicists and human resources offices. He skewers the oversaturated sound of modern pop and delivers a devastating refrain of “Stay young/get numb/keep dreaming” on “Screamland.” He can detail the nightmares of a bad trip with an orchestration that would make George Martin blush on “Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose.”
And it all comes with the understand that, really, none of us are in control of most of this. We have ourselves and our little rituals and a realization that we all play very, very small roles in this reality at large, and massive ones within ourselves. There’s no real resolution or prescription to all this, mind you. It’s just a series of observations. And there’s a brashness in the ability to hold up that light and simply say,
“A perfect lie can live forever
The truth don't fare as well”
Listening through this record, and listening through again and again, it becomes easier to look back at his two previous albums, God’s Favorite Customer and Chloë and the Next 20th Century, as two contrasting sides of a continuous double set — the former as a modern take on the singer-songwriter record, the latter a wild trek through early 20th century jazz and storytelling, ultimately culminating in its emotionally apocalyptic tale, “The Next 20th Century.”
With all those roads traveled, and traveled well, what follows is essentially a blank canvas. So we begin with the opening “Mahashmashana” where its walls of sound and reverb could’ve run seamlessly within George Harrison’s epic All Things Must Pass, all colliding to support Tillman’s message. The stark transition to the bass-heavy, Tom Waitsian “She Cleans Up” lays the trail for the rest of this album. No genre is safe.
It’s Father John Misty’s ability to be at once cynical and hopeful that makes everything he touches so relatable and so repeatable. Put it on in the background, and it’s a good time, whether that’s a solitary night or a party. Sit down and focus just that percentile more on the words spewing over those audacious melodies, and layer upon layer of meaning reveal themselves.
Maybe I’m reading too deeply into it. Maybe I’m just a guy who’s more than happy to have his next album pumping through my headphones as I read this. Maybe none of this matters. Maybe that’s the point.
E-mail Nick Tavares at nick@staticandfeedback.com