Father John Misty – ‘Mahashmashana’ review: perhaps his most sincere album yet

20 November, 2024

Father John Misty photographed in black and white, photo by Brent Goldman

“Who the folk is Father John Misty?” NME asked back in 2017. It was a fair question. Everyone knew by then that the singer-songwriter was a terminally online folkie – not the only contradiction about him – who’d followed an album of archly ironic love songs (2015’s ‘I Love You, Honeybear’) with a sprawling opus about the sheer madness of life in the 21st Century (‘Pure Comedy’). But who was he really?

An infamously agonising 6 Music interview had come no closer to uncovering the man behind the moniker, who was born Joshua Tillman but insisted that Father John Misty was not a character. If the answer to NME’s question lies somewhere in the liminal space between the earnest Tillman and the cynical Misty, the music has always been nakedly ambitious and rich with emotion. On his last album, 2022’s ‘Chloë and the Next 20th Century’, he threw his hands up at the modern world and retreated self-consciously into retro big band pastiche.

You’d think that capitulation might lead to a dead end, but ‘Mahashmashana’ finds Misty liberated from the obsession with contemporary pop culture that he’s grappled with since 2012’s ‘Fear Fun’. This might be related to his recent assertion that he’s experienced “a few non-elective ego deaths, where the self is receding” – including parenthood. So the gently psychedelic new record is named after a Sanskrit word meaning “great cremation ground”, its opening title track a string-laden epic ballad that breaks the nine-minute mark with surreal poetry hinting at “the next universal dawn”. You can only conclude it’s snarky old Misty who’s been toasted.

In his place has risen an apparently sincere engagement with spirituality that the phony Father only affected. On the loungey ‘Josh Tillman and the Accidental Overdose’, he seems to reflect on his own brief dalliance with celebrity. He once revealed that he was “completely fucked up” in that 6 Music interview, and here portrays another encounter, which leads him to confess: “Around this time, I publicly / Was treating acid with anxiety / I was unwell.”

Contrasting with this recollection, there’s a peacefulness to ‘Mahashmashana’, the tone grounded even when its author veers into psych-rock (the pounding ‘She Cleans Up’) and strutting funk (‘I Guess Time Makes Fools of Us All’). Half of its eight tracks spool on for more than six minutes and he’s not minded, these days, to explain them in interviews or on social media. Instead he’s bowed out from the spotlight to produce a record that tunes into love, ageing and the search for meaning without the compulsion for a punchline or wry aside.

As a result, the lush ‘Mahashmashana’ doesn’t quite mainline the zeitgeist in the same way that ‘Honeybear’ and ‘Pure Comedy’ did. Then again, there’s something to be said, in 2024, for logging off in favour of self-reflection. On the swooning ‘Mental Health’, Misty rejects the hive mind, concluding that his own particular “insanity” is “indispensable”. Whoever the folk he is underneath that beard, the good Father can’t help but share words of wisdom.