4 days Ago By Lisa Wright
The hallowed walls of London’s Royal Albert Hall have recently played host to guests from the Sex Pistols to Wet Leg , but perhaps there’s no modern day musician who feels quite as perfect a fit for the grand and storied building as Josh Tillman. Where the RAH’s stage has formerly been graced by Hollywood royalty and music’s diverse greats; academics and, for a lengthy stint, the Miss World pageant, Tillman has used his solo catalogue as Father John Misty to somehow encapsulate a flavour of and a commentary on all of the above and more. Last night, touring in support of sixth album Mahashmashana, he delivered a virtuosic trip through the clever, complex identity that has made Misty one of this century’s most intriguing musical characters.
Where, on his last visit to the capital, Tillman performed a grand set backed by the Britten Sinfonia orchestra, this show was pure classic Misty: lithely dancing through the heavy, crashing crescendos of Mr. Tillman to the fingerpicked country twang of Goodbye Mr. Blue, and tying all the dynamic shifts together with the singular, charismatic figure at its centre.
Within the first 30 minutes, he played a trio of self-referential songs bearing his name in the title. Variously rooting him in the midst of an existential acid trip (Josh Tillman and The Accidental Dose), wrestling with mania in a hotel room (the aforementioned Mr. Tillman) and part-way through a sexual tryst with an insufferable hook up (The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apt), all were delivered with the sort of wry expressiveness — an eye roll here, an embellished finger point there — of a revue show host.
It’s Josh Tillman, singing as Father John Misty, singing about Josh Tillman; playing with the blurred lines of where one ends and the other begins has always been part of the fun. Now a decade on from I Love You, Honeybear — the second album that propelled him into the spotlight (and, for a brief while, the tabloids) — there is a marked difference in the Father John Misty from that era to now. “Some of these are ones I wrote as a precocious 33-year-old man and, as time’s gone on, they become increasingly more unattractive for me to perform in public,” he declared ahead of the bar-room twangs and sexual competition of Nothing Good Ever Happens At The Goddamn Thirsty Crow.
Sinking to his knees and employing a barrage of blood-red lights for the track’s volatile peaks, these instances were then contrasted by the slow, anthemic apocalypse of Screamland, or the existential transcendence of Mahashmashana’s title track. Closing the main body of the set, the latter’s soaring musicality and golden glow arrived like a final moment of enlightenment. Of course, as much as you could pen a psychological dissertation on the lyrical nuances of Father John Misty’s back catalogue, none of it would matter were the songs themselves not this good.
Playing with a smart-suited seven-piece band, they tied the baroque harpsichords of Q4, Nancy From Now On’s romantic swoons and the slinking prowl of She Cleans Up together seamlessly. Eschewing some of his more dystopian classics, Tillman ended the night with I Love You, Honeybear’s sweeping, doe-eyed title track. Choosing celebration over cynicism, it was the right call for a show that should go down as a career peak.
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