Album review: Father John Misty – Pure Comedy
The tears of a clown have never felt more acidic than when sloping down the cheeks of Joshua Tillman, the eternally-conflicted troubadour who preaches and pines under the stage-name Father John Misty.
Breaking a two-year recording silence, his third album as FJM is perhaps his most fraught yet. Having dissected love and marriage on 2015’s I Love You, Honeybear, the follow-up broadens its scope to the entire human condition (“Pure Comedy is the story of a species born with a half formed brain,” he exclaims in the liner notes). A tragi-comedic mini-masterpiece ensues, its mix of angst and sly wit yielding a singular musical alchemy.
