Review:'FATHER JOHN MISTY' 'I Love You, Honeybear'
- Label: 'Bella Union Records'
- Genre: 'Pop'
- Release Date: '9th February 2015'
Our Rating:
Josh Tillman knows better than most that it''s no joke being a tortured artist.
He is a former beard (and drummer) in Seattle's Fleet Foxes and for years he also ploughed a lonely furrow as an intense solo singer-songwriter.
After seven albums under his own name, he decided to form a full band and get a fresh identity. In so doing, he has immerged reborn as a lighter, more ironic version of his former self.
In an interview with Spin he said: "It took ten years of creative wheel-spinning to see that I was allowed to be fun".
Fear Fun was the first album under the new moniker and his second release is archly described as "a concept album about a guy named Josh Tillman who spends quite a bit of time banging his head against walls, cultivating weak ties with strangers and generally avoiding intimacy at all costs".
Tillman may come from an Evangelical Christian background but as a travelling musician come preacher he has more in common with Hazel Motes' Holy Church of Christ Without Christ in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood than a conventional man of the cloth.
Whatever gospel he is preaching, it certainly has nothing to do with restraint or moderation. Recorded in Los Angeles with producer Jonathan Wilson, the song arrangements follow the principle that nothing succeeds like excess. As a result, you get an eclectic mix of orchestral strings, a mariachi band, electronic drum solos, ragtime jazz combos and soul singers.
Tillman's muse is his wife Emma, who has evidently inspired him to fly his freak flag and go hang the consequences. His songs are now replete with brazen sexuality and studied profanity in a mission to explore "the terrifying force of love, the unutterable pleasures of true intimacy". Imagine a more libidinous version of Jackson Brown and you'll get the picture.
For instance, on the title track he tells us of "ash and cum" on the sheets and when he sings "I want to take you in the kitchen" on Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins) you know he's not planning to make an omelette!
Six of the eleven tracks are labelled as having 'explicit' content on Spotify although, paradoxically, When You're Smiling And Astride Me is not one of them.
There are lively, and humorous, twists to what might otherwise be conventional love songs. He acknowledges yet mocks the vanities of macho behaviour while confessing to feelings of lust and paranoia.
There's a confessional side to The Ideal Husband ("I've said some awful things") but this is framed in a spirit of 'what the fuck' defiance.
In the blatantly autobiographical The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apartment he reveals "I just love the kind of woman who can walk over a man".
Dramatic scenarios, as in Nothing Good Ever Happens At The Goddamn Thirsty Crow, display the literary dimensions to his song writing and a wordiness that frequently strays into verbosity.
The comedy is delivered with a poker face as you can witness from his mannered performance (complete with canned laughter) of Bored In The USA with a 22-piece string section on The Late Show with David Letterman.
J.Tillman was a sad bastard and, while Father John Misty also has a serious side, his sermons offer more meaningful guidelines for good living.
Above all, there's a healthy sense of a man finding his true voice and wanting to tell the world or as Tillman puts it so eloquently: "I am truly singing my ass off all over this motherfucker".
