Father John Misty - Pure Comedy

The Quietus

Like a magician showing you the cards up his sleeve, Josh Tillman wants to wow you with the fact that he’s pulling off a trick as much as he wants to wow you with the trick itself. Hell, Josh Tillman wants to wow you by rolling his eyes at other magicians even as pulls a rabbit from his hat. The music itself is florid, the satire is incisive, and yet the one is constantly undercutting the other – and intentionally, while he flashes a smile.

He’s making art that mocks you, that mocks Father John Misty, that mocks Josh Tillman, that mocks itself, that mocks the entire world! But that music also needs to be beautiful and poignant to make any of that land. One false move and the cards all rattle out of his sleeve. Put everything together, and he pulls off an amazing trick. But by the end of Pure Comedy, his third as FJM, it seems he definitely has your card, though neither the fact nor the reveal feel all that surprising.

After working under his own name as a solo artist and as the drummer for Fleet Foxes, Tillman created the Father John Misty Experience as a grandiose heading from which he could finagle. It’s not an alter ego or an alternate persona, but Tillman full bore, erecting a pole from which he can wave the bombastic flag of his take on the world. He is undoubtedly aware that his satire will piss some people off, and even seems to relish that fact, both within and outside of his music. He has an impish streak akin to Tyler the Creator; the two share a joy in stirring shit up in order to point and say, “Hey, there’s shit over here.” Whether covering Ryan Adams’ covers of Taylor Swift or taking the music offline and claiming the ghost of Lou Reed told him to, Misty is fiddling on a level of performance at every step. He’s performing in the grandest sense, whether sashaying across a stage in a choreographed slinky-slime dance or pulling a deadpan soap opera pose, all in the hope of reminding everyone that we’re performing our own meaningless magic tricks day in and day out.

When Tillman brought a player piano, his own laugh track, and his soaring voice to The Late Show with David Letterman for I Love You Honeybear’s ‘Bored in the USA’, the surprise felt earned. That album paired its biting words with genuine warmth and love, inspired by his recent marriage and the dark well it drew him out of. The intersections of warm and cold, laughter and sighing, beauty and fragility were all personal and close to the vest, even when looking outwards. On Pure Comedy, the balance gets tipped entirely, the contents squelching out like sour milk. Instead he puts on his distressed bathrobe to take an indignant look around at the current political and societal surroundings. “All this scepticism and cynicism that I have felt my whole life became so literal,” he said in a recent interview with The Guardian. There’s an intensity to the darkness behind his satire, a scathing clarity.

And while the world around Misty has certainly gotten darker, it would seem that it’s gotten darker close to home as well. “I’m not my biggest fan either,” he says in that same Guardian interview, after discussing why some might disapprove of his satire. He knows he’s playing the Holden Caulfield of indie pop when calling out “these LA phonies and their bullshit bands” in the ten-part ‘Leaving LA’. The matrix of subversion and self-knowing is intensely reflexive, even inescapable. And in that step, Pure Comedy becomes almost conversationally bulletproof. Reacting to satire, especially such meta-satire, will get boiled down to either revering gospel or not getting some larger message. However, getting stuck in that dichotomy is itself dependent on buying into the value of the entertainment tradition that Misty so clearly wants to tear down. It’s a no-win situation, and if you say so, then that’s exactly what Misty wants you to say, nya-nya-n-nya-nya.

The thirteen-minute ‘Leaving LA’ exemplifies this taunting self-awareness. The most common gripe with Tillman is that he’s self-obsessed or too generally grandiose. Pure Comedy (or, I would say, Tillman in general) doesn’t suffer for its big ideas, it thrives on them; the real problem is the constant circling and underlining and pointing out those big ideas when just letting them sit and mystify in their black hole weightiness would do. Playing out as a mock epic poem or classical monologue—a fitting tie, considering the namedrops of Ovid and Oedipus—‘Leaving LA’ has so many self-aware nods that you’d think it had developed a tic. “I’m beginning to see the end/ Of how it all goes down between me and them/ Some ten-verse chorus-less diatribe/ Plays as they all jump ship/ I used to like this guy/ But this new shit makes me want to die,” he sings on the eighth verse, the song analysing itself.

The sardonic autobiography’s endless ramblings are ensconced within beautifully arranged orchestral trappings. Throughout Pure Comedy, Misty worked with Gavin Bryars and Nico Muhly to produce softly nodding melodies in lacquered piano, plush acoustic guitar, plenty of strings, horns, and slinky percussion, a lounge singer sitting in with the orchestra on his smoke break. The sighing title track and the Elton John-indebted swing “Total Entertainment” use their full complement of instrumentalists cleverly, maximizing the dramatic punch of every curling saxophone and elongated syllable, Misty chasing the spotlight like a game of hopscotch. The instrumental mixture flickers in principle, but starts to deteriorate and dim after only a few iterations.

Following that shift on verse eight of ‘Leaving LA’, Misty narrates a life-changing moment listening to Fleetwood Mac while almost choking to death as a child, his mother holding him. For Misty fans, verse eight is their bread and butter, taking on the self-indulgence of this sort of song. But admitting to self-indulgence isn’t the same as not being self-indulgent. “Leaving LA” knows its own strength and yet wants to make sure you know that it knows that—but also wants to apologize for it, rather than just let it be. Verse nine, that heartbreaking note about his relationship with his mother is the reason for the song, and the self-apologetic meta comedy cramps it severely.

Ambition isn’t Misty’s achilles heel; it’s the cracks of things falling apart under their own weight covered over by the caulking of Misty saying something like, “Well, I’m not that great anyway.” Tillman operates comfortably in this messy, postmodern maximalism, and yet it lacks the impact of his songs that approach meaning in more swift terms. He loses track of the impact in the micro as well, stretching words like “creature” out to their vowel-liest head-space in “Birdie” and spraying string glissandos throughout, leaving a want for a moment of punch. Songs start to blur together, their elongated tails connecting to the head of the follower, an ouroboros of soft tones and sharp tongue.

At every moment of the album, it’s clear Misty values his role as provocateur, something that can certainly make a big impact, particularly as he gets a bigger and bigger stage. But some of his punchlines in Pure Comedy, if it’s fair to call them that considering the album title, hit too bluntly on the nose. On “When the God of Love Returns There Will Be Hell to Pay,” he takes God on a tour of creation and shrugs to say “it’s just human nature,” a dusty, recycled trope. “What’s there to lose for a ghost in a cheap rental suit clinging to a rock that is hurtling through space?” he asks on ‘In Twenty Years or So’, equally tired and tested images. Moreover, the message of both those lines are covered more interestingly elsewhere. In ‘The Memo’, he takes religion to task sharply and in much fresher terms: “Keep the golden calf, just need the bullshit/ They won’t just sell themselves into slavery/ They’ll get on their knees and pay you to believe.” On ‘A Bigger Paper Bag’, he calls himself out for his posturing with much more incision than ‘Twenty Years’, showing far more personality. “I’ve got the world by the balls, am I supposed to behave?/ What a fraud, what a con/ You’re the only one I love,” he sings sweetly, rascally.

“Bedding Taylor Swift every night inside the Oculus Rift,” he sings on ‘Total Entertainment Forever’. It’s a headline, though it’s unclear whether he expected it to get an eye roll or outrage. And again, it’s somewhere in the middle: he could have chosen another VR server and/or celebrity—I’m thinking “Bedding Phil Donahue every night inside the Playstation Vue” is outdated, but close. But anyone who’s stopped by his merch table would know Misty has a familiarity with another provocateur with Swift-ian previous: Kanye West. Misty and Kanye have their similarities, but Kanye is unabashed about his intentions and drive, while Misty’s paired his with a heaping dose of irony and a dash of self-loathing. Both approaches have their charms for a moment, and both can get to be a bit much when grinded out in the long-term, repeated over and over.

And, at this point calling Swift into the mix doesn’t feel controversial, just on the nose. And if that line and others like it are offered to put an ironic filter on irony itself, to look at how ironic it is to be ironic … that dog chases its own tail infinitely. Analysing the meaning of entertainment and life itself via pop music has been done a dozen times, and doing so while offering up an answer has been done a dozen more. Misty’s acting as a spokesman for irony and a critic of life, telling us the world is terrible with a blasé laugh—but that isn’t particularly fresh territory, nor does the music pop and flash with any revelatory experience. There’s a predictability to his insouciance, which is its own ironic irony.

And that’s where the reveal of Pure Comedy can’t leave every listener oohing and aahing every time. He’s done being the entertainer on Letterman, coquettishly posed on top of his piano. But he’s clearly not done performing. There is a hinge there, and Misty has repeatedly railed in interviews on the difference between entertainment and art, which gets to it. He’s clearly making art on Pure Comedy, but he knows the thin line between performing and entertaining, and wants to be sure you see which side he’s on.

Allowing a little more mystery, a little more trust that the audience can follow along could make the trick magical. Or maybe we’ll wind up with Misty ditching the performance aspect altogether, instead just gnashing his teeth, rending his clothes, and screaming his truths into the void. Though something tells me he’d still turn to an imaginary camera and offer a wink at the end.

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The Guardian 100

Josh Tillman’s dark pronouncements, set to luscious, 70s-style orchestration, update the idea of the confessional singer-songwriter for the post-truth era

Towards the end of Pure Comedy’s 13-minute centrepiece track, Josh Tillman offers a glum assessment of the album’s commercial chances. His career’s current status, he claims, is under threat. “I’m beginning to begin to see the end of how it all goes down between them and me / Some 10-verse chorus-less diatribe plays as they all jump ship,” he sings, eight verses into the 10-verse chorus-less diatribe of Leaving LA. “‘I used to really like this guy / This new shit really kinda makes me wanna die.’”

Even if it seems unlikely that Pure Comedy is actually going to end Tillman’s career – numerous excitable reviews certainly suggest the opposite – you can see still why he might have had some trepidation about releasing it. On the surface, it doesn’t sound that different from his 2015 breakthrough album, I Love You, Honeybear. A little starker and more subtle, perhaps – the wilfully cluttered Phil Spector-isms of its predecessor are largely confined to one track, Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution – but the main musical influence audibly remains the records Elton John made in his first flush of superstardom.

Related: Father John Misty: ‘I get sick pleasure out of reading about how much people hate me’

Drowned In Sound 80

Recalling the exchange, Tillman chose to bear the brunt, noting that he was ‘completely fucked up’ on the morning in question. ‘This was Fear and Loathing level,’ he told The Guardian. ‘I’ve got these lizard men with English accents doing this Laurel-and-Hardy act on me and I just couldn’t deal with it. It’s not as if those guys were so horrible. It’s me. It’s my fault.’

Can we take such a naked mea culpa at face value? After all, in the same chat he claims to have never given an honest expression of himself when sat opposite a journalist. Again, it depends on how you interpret the character of Father John Misty. So, who or what is he? For some, he’s a wry, sardonic dude armed with a guitar and existential-tinged social commentary. For others, a modern court jester who points a visage of mournful apathy in the direction of his phone at award shows when his name isn’t called out.

He’s the ‘problematic fave’ for woke souls who want to fuck him but desperately need you to know how conflicted they feel about such desire. His often frivolous social media exploits are deemed worthy of real-time-updated Pitchfork news stories, a distinction usually reserved for Kanye West. Even his press release underscores ‘the infuriating line he seems to occupy between canny and total fraud online and in interviews’.

Perhaps we shouldn’t fixate on it, for to do so runs the risk of diluting the work. Perhaps the jape is on us as we look past the duality of adopting a supposedly quirky persona only to use it as a means of telling difficult truths. Perhaps Father John Misty is simply ”another white guy in 2017 who takes himself so goddamn seriously”, as he muses on ‘Leaving LA’, a 13-minute ramble with no chorus and one deliberately languid speed. Three years in the making, that particular round of self-effacement and personal confession may prove a bridge too far for some, but it is both knowing and rewarding in its demands.

Take the traumatic recollection of a Fleetwood Mac-scored near-death experience when Tillman was just a child, presented here in almost throwaway fashion as it concludes the penultimate verse of a movement that ultimately sidesteps a punchline… or does it? ‘Leaving LA’ is a challenge. Depending on your mood, it might be a chore. Arriving as the centrepiece of what very much registers as a concept album, it makes perfect, bittersweet sense. Pure Comedy is a state of the world address and Tillman is determinedly critical of the “godforsaken rock that refuses to die” and ”bright blue marble orbited by trash” upon which he finds himself pontificating.

His brand of satire – a mixture of acid and silver tongue – is immediately evident as a kick-off title track tunes into a frequency at once theatrical, despairing and sobering. The arrangement – lush and beautiful, a true embarrassment of riches – builds and blooms in distinctly winsome fashion, as if a descendant of Elton John’s titular ‘Rocket Man’ grew up to feel a similar sense of disconnection with humanity, despite being at least physically closer to it than his progenitor.

The argument can and will be made that Pure Comedy is both highly self-indulgent and one-dimensional. Such a stance has merit – it’s kind of the point, really – but does a disservice to tracks like ‘Total Entertainment Forever’ and ‘Things It Would Be Helpful to Know Before the Revolution’, two instances of layered, direct storytelling. The former has already grabbed headlines for its pornographic Taylor Swift-based opening salvo, but Tillman is unapologetic about following in the Yeezy Boosts of another outspoken orator who invoked the pop queen as an avatar for modern life’s superficial ills. Clunky? A little. Fair? Probably not, but here we are.

Where we are is important to Father John Misty. Over 75 minutes he takes aim at technology, hypocrisy, social media, politics, human nature and the frailties that come along with being so very vulnerable when one strips away all of the distractions and glamour that propel us through our numbered days. Despite the running time, it should be noted that Pure Comedy moves at a clip; only ‘The Memo’ and its cold boardroom-speak textures belabour the narrative a little too much on a record that’s all about stretching out an exact, unwavering thread.

‘So I’m Growing Old On Magic Mountain’ is a career peak, one that recalls the fine work of Vangelis on his Blade Runner score in its second half as Tillman’s insightful, introspective vocals melt away in place of a warm, rather gorgeous synth flourish and a rising tension that manages to soothe as well as shake. He’s realised a sense of acceptance here, and while you won’t necessarily need that sentiment to be reinforced on the closing ‘In Twenty Years or So’, its final bow is a welcome one for those who struggle with feelings of insignificance and a fear of their own mortality.

It’s not that Tillman has all the answers – if anything, he’s keenly aware of his own shortcomings and seems to be up for the fight, for meeting the callous indifference afforded by the cosmic joke that begins at birth. Despite its multitude of sideways glances, Pure Comedy isn’t a contemptuous sneer, rather an attempt to dust oneself off and seek control of a ship that’s destined to sink no matter what. He’s pondered before about not being able to ‘shut the fuck up’ whilst drumming for Fleet Foxes but unfiltered enunciation suits Joshua Tillman or Father John Misty or whatever you want to call him, at least for right now. He remains unknowable, and maybe that’s the sharpest gag of all.

Pitchfork 76

Father John Misty presents a sprawling double-feature: the skewering of an infantile generation, and the self-skewering of its author. From the mind of an apocalyptically inclined neurotic, who reads Žižek and Freud and believes humanity is condemned to moral chaos, comes Pure Comedy, a grueling, often inspired odyssey that screams to be taken as art. Across its 75 minutes, humility is scarce. In one song, having indexed the species’ flaws, he reprimands God: “Try something less ambitious next time you get bored.” It is intense, fatalistic, exhausting, and grandiose—sometimes devastating, sometimes pretentious. (Regarding love—he’s not really doing that anymore.) So yes, it is a Father John Misty album, and Josh Tillman still excels at tormenting those unlucky souls who enjoy his music.

The record is also Tillman’s first opportunity to confront pop culture from the frontline. After releasing I Love You, Honeybear, whose inquiry into romance and masculine folly won many hearts, he coasted through the last two years as an indie firebrand. He perfected theatrical cynicism, sarcastically covering Taylor Swift, trolling music sites, claiming responsibility for a stolen crystal and using the coverage to denounce health food. He shot a video with Lana Del Rey, who shares something of his postmodern mystique, and wrote for Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, who do not.

That behind him, the Pure Comedy circus kicked into gear at a New Jersey music festival last July. Instead of his songs, Tillman performed a rambling soliloquy, triangulating Trump anxiety, the obstetrical dilemma hypothesis, corporate evil, folksy escapism, and the “fucked up entertainment complex.” Along with all those themes, Pure Comedy channels the speech’s righteous delirium, a rhetorical mode Tillman finds irresistible. If his confessions favor ironic distance, his big-picture theses exude something close to rapture. “The Memo,” a highlight here, smashes together cynicism and compassion, with Tillman declaring that it’s “not self-love that kills you,” it's when “those who hate you” are allowed to profit from your vulnerability. Such sermons are typically repelling, but what saves him from insufferable smartassery—for the most part—is his ability to turn yelling at clouds into a grand form of entertainment.

Pure Comedy follows the thread of Honeybear outliers “Holy Shit” and “Bored in the USA.” The latter concealed sincerity beneath melodrama, its mockery of “middle-class problems” complicated by troubling reflections on depression. Those uncomfortable collisions—bourgeois ills explored through otherwise sympathetic characters—emerge throughout Pure Comedy.

Beneath Pure Comedy’s synth-dappled country, blue-eyed soul, and pop fashioned after George Harrison is a battleground filled with religion, pop culture, technology, and neoliberalism. To open “Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution,” a wonderful portrait of life after the climate apocalypse, Tillman nonchalantly topples capitalism: “It got too hot,” he sings, “And so we overthrew the system.” Midway in, an orchestral cacophony swirls into an outrageous chorus, which I’m sure Tillman would love to see quoted unabridged:

“Industry and commerce toppled to their knees
The gears of progress halted
The underclass set free
The super-ego shattered with our ideologies
The obscene injunction to enjoy life
Disappears as in a dream
And as we returned to our native state
To our primal scene
The temperature, it started dropping
And the ice floes began to freeze”

The indulgence is pure Tillman. But the passage, in all its mad glory, matches the size of the task, particularly in times of total dysfunction. It’s never been easier to sympathize with Tillman’s pomposity. Only in the song’s conclusion does the façade collapse, as “visionaries” start developing products that will rejoin this new society with capitalist realism. A cop-out, maybe, but who else would have copped in to begin with?

While “Revolution” is its least discreet flirtation with utopianism, Pure Comedy makes plenty of time to call bullshit on visionary capitalism. The title track swirls with religious fanaticism, secular ideology, and pharmaceutical greed into a repudiation of almost everything. In the last chorus—“But the only thing that they request/Is something to numb the pain with/Until there’s nothing human left”—the record hurtles into a chronically pleasurable near-future. “Total Entertainment Forever” is a postcard from the brave new world: Backed by sarcastically ecstatic horns, Tillman celebrates a “permanent party” where our appetite for distraction has eroded the old-fashioned human soul. His characters finish the chores, slide on the Oculus Rift, and jump into bed with the pop star du jour. He heralds the “freedom to have what you want” in a tone that suggests freedom, whatever it may be, does not look like this.

After that opening suite—“Pure Comedy,” “Total Entertainment Forever,” and “Revolution”—the music settles into a tonal plateau. Even the most gripping songs unspool with acoustic leisure, and they can be long and lofty trips. The spiritual anchor is “Leaving LA,” in which fragments of orchestral splendour—all arranged by the brilliant Gavin Bryars—are buried beneath a 13-minute pilgrimage through Father John Misty’s psyche. An unappetizing prospect, perhaps, but he writes captivating scenes; one revisits a traumatic childhood saga soundtracked by Fleetwood Mac’s “Little Lies” in a JCPenney, another a New Year’s sunset that “reminds me, predictably, of the world’s end.”

Five verses into the song, Tillman inserts a mocking female character: He’s just “another white guy in 2017,” she groans, “who takes himself so goddamn seriously.” “Leaving LA” reaches for transcendent honesty, but this lyric feels misjudged. Is this a sincere concern or an attempt to shoot down nonexistent thinkpieces? Father John Misty’s music is certainly exasperating, but it’s not due to his entitlement so much as that irrepressible impulse to outpace the listener’s criticism. The moment somebody says, “I know I’m being annoying” is often when you realize it’s true.

Tillman has, of course, anticipated this critique. His childish desire to be loved or hated on his own terms is dredged up on “A Bigger Paper Bag,” but there’s an added, delicate touch that’s endearing. “It’s easy to assume that you’ve built some rapport/With someone who only likes you for what you like yourself for,” he sings, over a woozy arrangement evoking peak Elliott Smith. “You be my mirror/But always remember/There are only a few angles I tend to prefer.” It’s a rare callback to Honeybear’s psychological burrowing, and I find myself returning to it. His sociological bombast is dwarfed by these quiet revelations.

The scarcity of such interludes doesn’t undermine the Misty manifesto, but it does mean the record’s pontifications, particularly the tired false equivalencies of “Two Wildly Different Perspectives,” can test your patience. David Foster Wallace—whose critiques on irony, entertainment, and self-consciously “hideous men” are all over Pure Comedy—once advocated for bleak fiction in dark times. Wallace said that it should “find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.” This redemptive spirit eludes Tillman. Given his off-record provocations—that a pop star’s “wearing next to nothing” strips her music of value, for instance—it’s reasonable to expect him to dream up something for us to really care about (or at least to button up his shirt). He instead settles on soothing defeatism, a litany of conquered crises whose lessons amount to, “That’s just the way it is.” Given the album’s thematic largesse, it’s almost charming. Almost. But you wonder what kind of progressive future he envisions: that which will lift society or merely flatter his own intellect.

The Guardian 60

(Bella Union)
The follow-up to I Love You, Honeybear unfolds like a would-be Great American Novel, but it’s too clever by half and swamped by mid-tempo piano tracks

You could describe Father John Misty as a satirical maverick; you get the feeling he would like you to. In 2012, Josh Tillman, the former Fleet Foxes drummer, released Fear Fun, a gonzoid set of songs about a druggy Californian breakdown, the first under his pseudonym. In 2015 he followed it with I Love You, Honeybear. The funny, filthy, orchestral tale of how a messed-up male cynic found love in a corrupted world, it instantly surpassed his previous work. But Misty’s other output – snarky radio face-offs, confessional interviews – has compounded the distracting impression of a singer-songwriter who delights in being an irritant.

I Love You, Honeybear’s successor seeks to expand on its ambitious musical and thematic flights. Pure Comedy is a would-be Great American Novel, a clever, despairing paean to everything that is wrong: absurdity, religion, the entertainment-isation of everything. The first stumbling block to its greatness comes in the album’s 70-minute length; the second in its DDoS attack of string-laden piano ballads, most in hock to 70s Elton John. It’s as though Misty has taken Honeybear’s least appealing song – the self-important, canned-applause satire Bored in the USA – and written an album around it, rather than the good tracks about shagging someone you love. When A Bigger Paper Bag recalls Elliott Smith, it comes as succour.