Album review: Father John Misty – Pure Comedy

4/5

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.

As might be anticipated Tillman isn’t particularly optimistic about the state of mankind in the early 21st century. “Bedding Taylor Swift/Every night inside the Oculus Rift,” he croons on ‘Total Entertainment Forever’, a commentary on how sensory overload is turning us into zonked sensation seekers with terminally short attention spans.

It doesn’t get any jollier. The 1970s-style title track compares the stranglehold of religion and America’s dependency on prescription medication even as it strikes up a lilting Randy Newman melody.

On ‘Things It Would Have Been Helpful To Know Before The Revolution’ he meanwhile looks ahead to an apocalypse brought about by global warming.

With Tillman, disentangling the universal and the personal is always tricky. However, he has identified the 13 minute orchestral rocker ‘Leaving LA’ as the most important track here, chronicling as it does a period of disharmony between the singer and his wife (“That song is so personal because it is about this moment when Emma and I were very uncertain about our future together.”).

Such despondent observations are couched in warm, piano-pop arrangements, over which Tillman sings in a honeyed croon.

Blending tranquilliser quantities of existential despair with troubadour rock is undoubtedly Tillman’s idea of a grand skit — though it’s clear at all points that the joke is on us.