Father John Misty Waltzes Through Folkloric Wisdom on Mahashmashana

Father John Misty has little to say about his new record, Mahashmashana. “After a decade being born, Josh Tillman is finally busy dying,” reads a statement about the balladeer behind the Father John Misty moniker. A better description might be “Josh Tillman is taking his sweet time dying.” And would it be a terrible thing to say that it sounds wonderful?

Tillman’s sixth album processes life’s finite quality as something neutral, not reveling in the end of the nightmare, nor cowering at the unknown, but dancing with the natural order of things through songs that often stretch past the eight and nine minute mark. To maintain that balance, he filters the album’s folkloric wisdom through mood swings, narrating with dissociative curiosity (“Being You”), numbed-up existentialism (“Screamland”) and reluctant nostalgia (“Summer’s Gone”).

Notice the absence of outright sadness: God’s Favorite Customer, Tillman’s 2018 work tracing the fractures of a relationship, is more crestfallen by a mile, and large portions of its predecessor, Pure Comedy, certainly feel more pessimistic. Mahashmashana might be the healthiest and most wisecrack-laden thesis on the circle of life in recent memory. The album extends Tillman’s repertoire of lush string sections and sprightly, folk-adjacent rock, although both sounds embrace a new purpose by underscoring Tillman’s grab bag of oral tradition. Darting strings dramatize the verses of “Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose,” while a groove carved from piano and saxophone chugs “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools Of Us All” through its mighty runtime of eight minutes and 36 seconds.

For the Mahashmashana title, Tillman employs the Sanskrit word meaning “great cremation ground.” Fending off a holier-than-thou attitude are the casually savage details that ground the music in humanity’s shortcomings: caustic phrases like “donor-class panache” and “tacit fascists,” paired with a mockery of modern thoughtlessness. (“Use your discretion so I don’t have to use mine,” he commands on the blues-rock twister “She Cleans Up.”) Tillman is not exempt from criticism, either. “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools Of Us All” references when Rolling Stone told him that he was “easily the least famous” person to turn down the magazine’s cover, while “Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose” admits to his “treating acid with anxiety.”

The poetic jabs have long been one of Tillman’s hallmarks, but here they lend him more credibility as Mahashmashana’s narrator; you can’t comment on life’s splendor if you can’t acknowledge the ugliness that often outshines it. Maybe that’s why Tillman’s denser tales here seem more like riddles than straight-up sermons. Many of the album’s cryptic vignettes about kings, religion and an empty panopticon (have fun Googling that) won’t click immediately, giving listeners parables to chew on indefinitely. If anyone is going to spoon-feed the hard facts of life to listeners, it is not Tillman, who’d likely rather you gag a bit trying to figure it out on your own—not out of malice, but on principle.

After all, Tillman seems to have done his own existential homework in recent years. “I’ve had a few non-elective ego deaths, where the self is receding,” he told Blackbird Spyplane earlier this year. What we’re left with is a version of Tillman that feels like the average of all past Father John Mistys: the satirist, the pessimist, the perverse romantic. He’s a narrator who is wiser than us, yet scraping by alongside us as we collectively run out the clock. For listeners who are particularly attached to any one version of the artist, Mahashmashana will likely underwhelm. Everyone else will walk away with a soundtrack for tempering their next existential crisis.

Victoria Wasylak is an award-winning music journalist, a music columnist for The Boston Globe, and the Boston music editor of Vanyaland. Her work has appeared in Paste, NYLON, GRAMMY.com, WBUR, and Under The Radar, and she’s written over a dozen episodes of the world-renowned music and true crime podcast, Disgraceland. Last year she appeared in Forbes’ inaugural 30 Under 30 list for Boston.