Ask your virtual assistant of choice for the album which epitomised 2017 and chances are it will start playing songs from Pure Comedy, Josh Tillman’s manacled third outing in character, and the kind of sprawling tossed salad of self-awareness and self-loathing which counted the first year of the post-everything era as its only friend.
How much you cared depended on how much of his Father John Misty creature feature you could manage at any one sitting; written largely in the first person, each five or six-minute entreaty to millennial shock and awe got progressively more tiresome than the last. Of course, most critics loved it.
Less than a year later a still bruised public are presented with God’s Favorite Customer, a record which was written largely in a New York hotel and reflects, so it’s said, on the experience of being caught between the ‘vertigo of heartbreak and the manic throes of freedom’.
So far, so predictably self-absorbed as a way to describe what the rest of us know as a break-up. But whilst Tillman/Misty’s outlook remains set to melancholy by default, there’s a noticeable ridding here of the indulgent streak that blighted all but Pure Comedy’s best moments.
Recorded with a troupe including long-time collaborator Jonathan Wilson, Haxan Cloak, Natalie Merring of Weyes Blood, and self-produced, God’s Favorite Customer scores heavily over its predecessor simply by returning to good old fashioned songs as opposed to monologues set to music.
Opener Hangout At The Gallows premieres this new, stripped down Father Josh, a slightly older and slightly wiser rumination on how things can go a little more wrong with each tiny mistake whilst the band boom-bust some fat piano notes by the side of an empty dancefloor.
Pure Comedy’s Achilles heel was the lack of chuckles despite the title, so it’s a welcome return to the absurdist’s creed of old on Mr. Tillman, the singer refusing to surrender his reality to the lipo and manicured falsehoods masquerading as fellow guests in slicked accommodation where all the rooms are identically spotless windows on the soul.
Perhaps this refusal to relate is what we’ve come to expect. But there is also a waxing intimacy here, a sense on songs like Just Dumb Enough To Try and The Palace that, involuntarily, some of the layers have been scraped away, the latter’s refrain of ‘I’m in over my head’ jarring against the bare ivory bones of the music itself. Almost unburdened by not having to pretend, it might be the best thing Tillman’s committed to record in his career.
A record that could just as easily have been entitled “Who’s Behind Door Number One This Time”, Josh Tillman veers from heartbreak to diagnosis and back amongst the sort of rubble you sense he’ll always claim was like that when he found it. Should he ever find his muse in happy-ever-after mode you suspect the product will be one of the greatest albums ever written.
For now though, he remains a talent under someone else’s lock and key, perhaps the big fella of the title, or anyone else willing to be the jailer stood on the other side of his confessional wall.
