“Mahashmashana” is a Sanskrit word meaning “great cremation ground”. Could that mean this is Josh Tillman’s last album as Father John Misty ? He’s already buried the J Tillman alter-ego, under which he released his first eight, folkier albums. This is his sixth as the sly, Scott Walker-indebted preacher and it comes in the wake of this summer’s Greatish Hits release, capping the career arc that – he jokes here – made him “easily the least-famous artist” to turn down the cover of Rolling Stone .
Whether or not this is the end for Tillman as FJM, Mahashmashana certainly finds him swilling around big queasy questions of mortality and identity. The record opens with the title track, a big bombastic swoon of Seventies-style strings’n’sax-backed soft rock, which takes the arrangements of 2022’s Chloë and the Next 20th Century up a notch. It’s a tale that shifts in and out of focus, seemingly about a singer realising that in “the next universal dawn” he “won’t have to do the corpse dance.
.. won’t have to do the one about the country’s boyfriend.
” Tillman’s combo of straight-shooting vocal with these head-spinning sonic backdrops can make him sound marvellously like Glen Campbell singing Jimmy Webb’s classic1968 “Witchita Lineman”. He also dials directly into that song’s tone of triumph and despair, although he ends on a darker note with the strings screeching upwards and off the road in the final bars. Tillman hits a new groove.
