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Dec 20, 2024 Web Exclusive By Celine Teo-Blockey

There has been some online speculation that Josh Tillman might sunset his sage but wisecracking Father John Misty alter-ego after his sixth album, Mahashmashana, which takes its name from the Sanskrit word meaning “great cremation pit.” For Hindus, Mahashmashana is Varanasi, the holy city in India where there are death hotels that the dying check-in to check out. Their corporeal forms then set alight on funereal pyres. Their souls transcend. The site is sacred.

Tillman, prone to mysticism and magical thinking, chose the lush nine-and-a-half minute title track—featuring grand orchestral sweeps, a weepy saxophone, and Hammond organ—to open his eight-song short album of long songs. For him, Mashashmashana signifies ego-death and summons a new beginning. “Mahashmashana all is silent now / And in the next universal dawn / Won’t have to do the corpse dance,” he sings between dense descriptors that paint a scene of two characters, leading up to their moment of copulation in the back of a Porsche—the “midnight blue Cayenne.” Tillman became a father in recent years but sidesteps writing a gushing album about how fatherhood has made him a better man. Instead he hints at the weight of his own depression, “She is patient / the act of creation / May one day produce a happy man.” And on “Mental Health,” wanting better for his offspring, “magic child, run baby, run.”

He continues to make acute observations on the ongoing firestorm that is modern life in late stage capitalism: of climate catastrophe where on final track “Summer’s Gone” he wishes for “grey skies in the heat of day” and on “Mahashmashana,” crumbling institutions that are hollowed out by plutocrats “resplendent in donor class panache.” He pulls from the ’70s singer/songwriter playbook of John Lennon, George Harrison, and Harry Nilsson, echoing Jim Morrison’s poeticism and Frank Zappa’s satire. That decade’s turbulence appears quaint compared to present day ills, and it’s this distillation of warm nostalgia with Tillman’s less snarky and more languid croon that permeates across the album like a salve. “Screamland” is the standout here.

The most up-tempo track, “She Cleans Up,” imagines Mary Magdalene as a kind of Kill Bill assassin doing the Lord’s work, protecting her “baby,” Jesus, the Friday night before his fatal audience with Pontius Pilate. And while in a later verse, the lens pulls out to reveal the heat of a lover’s quarrel, it still sees Tillman in praise of all women do in the domestic sphere and beyond. This electro-blues and honky tonk bop, replete with cowbells is so intoxicating, you’re going to want to throw a house party just so you can put this on and boogie to it.

Mahasmashana is a triumph and return to form for Tillman, who navigates themes of impermanence, rebirth, duality of mind and body, and the passage of time, without cynicism but much needed grace—for a world that his child will inherit. (www.fatherjohnmisty.com)

Author rating: 9/10