Tillman Schmillman
Alternate reality Hollywood explored via high-definition orchestral manoeuvres. By Tom Doyle.
Father John Misty ★★★★ Chloë And The Next 20th Century BELLA UNION. CD/DL/LP
GIVEN HOW Josh Tillman’s nowdecade-long adventure as Father John Misty has pursued Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman more than any lasting traces of his former band Fleet Foxes, it was perhaps inevitable that his career would wend its way towards an orchestral or standards-style album. But while there are echoes of Sail Away and A Little Touch
Of Schmilsson In The Night in Misty’s fifth, the overall effect is of a Hollywood album moving from the ’30s through to the ’60s and melding those influences to create an imagined version of the past.
For Tillman, topping 2017’s masterful, 75-minute long, end of days conceptual record Pure Comedy was always going to be a challenge. So, on 2018’s God’s Favorite
Customer, he didn’t really try, ending up with a fairly straight collection of songs. Four years on, it seems, it was time for another grand gesture, and one involving a reunion with Jonathan Wilson (co-producer of the first three Misty albums) and full-scale orchestral scores recorded at United Recordings in LA – fittingly the scene of historic sessions by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Glen Campbell.
Opener Chloë, and side two’s Only A Fool, impress in terms of their elaborate, ’30s/’40s-styled strings, horns and woodwind arrangements, but play it strictly trad. Things get more interesting when the Vaselineon-the-lens blurring begins, such as when Tillman’s voice is fed through disorientating tremolo in Kiss Me (I Loved You) or when the orchestration backgrounds an examination of the modern Hollywood star system in Funny Girl, with its central character a “fivefoot Cleopatra” flashing a “manic smile”.
Underscoring the great American songbook vibes, one of the highlights here, Buddy’s Rendezvous, an elegant sketch of LA ambition and ennui, has already been covered by Lana Del Rey on a 7-inch available with the limitededition vinyl version of the album. It’s a chancy, if successful move, proving that Tillman’s writerly skills likely would have shone in any era.
Similarly, in Goodbye, Mr Blue, even when sailing close to Nilsson’s reading of Fred Neil’s Everybody’s Talkin’, he offers a moving reminder of the beauty of life’s impermanence (“This may be the last time I lay here with you”). Matched to slo-mo strings, tumbling acoustic guitar and brushed snare drum skipping over the ocean like a stone, it’s way more than homage.
Closing with the seven-minute The Next 20th Century, Tillman relates a never-more-Misty shaggy dog tale involving a Nazi wedding band and Val Kilmer’s full-length mirror circa his Batman period, before finding comfort in classic pop culture amid our discomfiting present and uncertain future, as if tuning into radio waves broadcast long ago: “I’ll take the love songs/And the great distance that they came.” Ultimately, then, as Chloë And The
Next 20th Century sees Father John Misty escaping into his own parallel Hollywood reality, it’s highly entertaining to slip in alongside him.