Lately it’s been almost impossible to shake the idea that Josh Tillman has somehow been kidnapped by his Father John Misty Hyde and is now party to some sort of bizarre, Stockholm Syndrome identity trap, a performer self cultifying, his wild internet parables being passed down from social media platform to social media platform, a contemporary Moses using tablets and phones.
As with many things, it all seemed so much (OK, just a little) simpler on 2015’s I Love You, Honeybear, a post-nuptial odyssey into politics – sexual, cultural, personal – bolstered with the odd drive-by aimed in the direction of organised religion and/or the disorganised, post-lateral beliefs of the very people who it seemed made up 90% of the raconteur’s audience.
Its conflicted premise aside, in execution Tillman’s second album was in places utterly gorgeous, full of soul and playful melody, a record which presented him as a character study primed for bigger, if not through his idiosyncratic eyes, better things.
Unsurprisingly, the major labels then came calling and the one time Fleet Foxes drummer has confessed he considered their olive branch before girding his loins and remaining with Sub Pop, a case of professional hermitary balanced by a dazzlingly outré meta which he chooses to externalise to either shock emoji or LOL emoji effect amongst his frothing acolytes and naysayers equally.
Now arrives Pure Comedy, a difficult third album in every imaginable sense of the word. The struggle, it seems, for Tillman is very much real – to the extent that at a whopping 75 minutes Pure Comedy by accident or design (surely the latter) is architected to require considerable self-sacrifice from the listener before its many conceits become iconoclastic friezes.
More than twenty of these minutes consist of just two songs: Leaving LA, a chorus-less monologue on the paranoia and selfish tenet of twenty-first century alt-stardom, and the relatively svelte So I’m Growing Old On Magic Mountain, which probably isn’t but should be a metaphorical jab at his supposed use of LSD to medicate against the modern torpedoes of depression and anxiety.
Depending on your perspective, you’ll be either offended or enthralled, or perhaps both. At times the thick sheen of irony is impossible to wipe off; the sparkling waltz of The Memo is a lyrical cautionary tale about how much of a prisoner we are, in hock to our phony belief systems until a stranger on the internet calls in the debt: “Cameras to record you and mirrors to recognise/And as the world is getting smaller, small things take up all your time/Narcissus would’ve had a field day if he could’ve got online”.
Thankfully there’s still time for plain, last millennia style titillation via Total Entertainment Forever, the now (in)famous opening line, “Bedding Taylor Swift/Every night inside the Oculus Rift” a ribald note to those liberal paragons for whom self-censorship, Tillman opined, has reduced their existence to practically nothing.
Such headily disposable moments – the sort which made its predecessor so textural and appealing – are disappointingly rare. Instead, for light relief, the listener gets to hunker down with Josh/Father as he deftly conjures up some vintage Laurel Valley chromatics, a study in 1970’s haze which peaks admirably on Things Which Would Be Useful To Know Before The Revolution, the singer and the song louchely resembling a Bolshevik Elton John.
It’s a signature episode from a complicated man with a singular talent for many things, but amongst the diatribes, emotional wreckage and cyber-deforestation of the ID we reach only one other such peak, the bombast-less frisson of Another Paper Bag. A moment of tuneful vulnerability, its weathered, wonky tones plus the arch couplet, “Dance like a butterfly/And drink like a fish”, bring a temporary salvation from being spiritually crushed by an intellect that has seemingly weighed and measured the usefulness of everything and everyone on the planet.
In a time when we so rigidly believe that there’s not much worth believing in, Pure Comedy is avarice, an event horizon for everything, Armageddon wrapped in a velvet glove and sounding like the devil b/w a choir of angels. Complex, nuanced, overpaid, oversexed and over here, like its creator itself the inner meaning could be a mirror or a window.
You decide though, because we sure as hell can’t.
