“The comedy of man start’s like this:
Our brains are way too big for our mother’s hips
So, nature, she devised this alternative
We emerge half-formed and hope whoever greets us on the other end
Is kind enough
To fill us in
And, babies, that’s pretty much how it’s been ever since”
The universe is a cold, unforgiving, arbitrarily chaotic, cruel sonuvabitch. I’ve used this album whenever the above statement rings true, to remind myself that terrible truth of existence. The universe is, in fact, a cold, unforgiving, arbitrarily chaotic, often very cruel sonuvabitch.
Josh Tillman has followed up the critically acclaimed I Love You, Honeybear with Pure Comedy, a fantastic, seventy-five-minute journey through love, life, and the human condition. Honeybear was among the most acclaimed albums of 2015, appearing in almost everyone’s top two (I’d say top one were it not for Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly) for good reason. The album, Tillman’s sophomore LP under the Father John Misty name, is a funny, darkly humorous, moving look at the redemptive possibilities of love, and being well, and being truly sick of your own shit. Arecord both empathetic and ironic, with a layers of indie folk and soft rock as whipped cream.
It’s easy to see a side of ourselves in Father John Misty. The deeply flawed, misanthropic, cynical character Tillman creates – like a Nick Hornby protagonist: he’s someone that you reluctantly embrace. The tight instrumentation and enthralling folk rock music that came with the package is something of a bonus. And I say this as someone who initially thought it was “overrated” and “just good” - I can’t deny its merit. Tillman really showed great poetical prowess on the record, with lyricism both ironic and thought-provoking. In two lines, he could say something genuinely hilarious and something with huge emotional resonance.
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“Oh, and love is just an institution
Based on human frailty
What’s your paradise gotta do with Adam and Eve?
Maybe love is just an economy
Based on resource scarcity
What I fail to see is what that’s gotta do
With you and me”
Honeybear has a track, “Bored in the USA”, that I found interesting in the context of this new album. It’s a sarcastic, regretful ode to consumerism and the American Dream, a produces a parallel: a bridge between the two albums. It could easily be a track on Pure Comedy with different, perhaps colder and more spacious production. Almost, as if, foreshadowing this album.
Pure Comedy kicks off with its title track, the lead single. This song is a wonderful opener and, quite possibly, the best song of the entire album. Within, Tillman takes cues from Billy Joel and Harry Nilsson as he does his best at summarizing the comedy of man. Like most of the songs on the record “Pure Comedy” is a piano-led ballad, and the track builds slowly, beginning with a single line of melody before the percussion and horns are thrown in. The frantic sax soloing during the song’s bridge serves to underline the genuine absurdity, the arbitrary chaos, the pure comedy, if you will, of existence.
The fluttering, jarring synth sounds throughout the song’s background further emphasize the abrasive absurdity of the universe we inhabit. Tillman is a wonderful singer. I think he’s similar to Matt Berninger of the National in that he needs to shout more, because the best part of this song is his terrified yell of “Oh, it’s like something that a madman would conceive!” It’s such a gratifying, genuine screech.
“Oh, comedy
Their illusions they’ve no choice but to believe
Their horizons that just forever recede
And how’s this for irony
Their idea of being free
Is a prison of beliefs
That they never ever have to leave”
But my appraisal of the record’s side-one track-one is not to say that the album peaks early; consider, this thing’s over an hour long. Tillman begins the next song, “Total Entertainment Forever,” by rhyming everybody’s favorite snake: "Swift," with Oculus “Rift.” It’s more or less the album’s banger. I honestly believe that the ironic, upbeat brass hook belongs in a dystopian musical.The song’s David Foster Wallace-esque subject matter ~ the entertainment’s enslaving us, man! ~ may not be entirely original (see: Wall-E, Black Mirror, The Matrix, A.I, etc) but Tillman’s lyricism comes off as neither forced nor preachy.
Pure Comedy is, as you may have inferred, less personal than I Love You, Honeybear, but I don’t see this as a bad thing. It’s more interesting to me to hear someone wax philosophical than to hear them sing love songs, though this record does have a few of those. And good ones, too. “Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution” is not one of them, but it's a gorgeous, lonely piece about helplessness in an anarchist utopia. This song encompasses the fictitious realities that could take place if the world were to resort to its primal state, from the beginning of our species.
“Sometimes I miss the top of the food chain
But what a perfect afternoon”
“Ballad of the Dying Man” is the third single and the fourth track off the record. Tillman’s poetry really shines here, as he depicts a socio-political Internet commentator on his deathbed going through the various stages of grief throughout the song’s three verses. There’s an apparent country music influence on this song, highlighted by the uptuned acoustic guitar and choral vocals towards the finale. He performs some absolutely gorgeous falsetto here in the chorus. For all the man’s irony, he really is a fantastic vocalist.
The album’s centerpiece, however, is “Leaving L.A”: it’s thirteen minutes long, and it’s “the whitest, most acoustic thing you’ll ever hear”, as Tillman puts it. And it is terrific. The Father waxes philosophical on life, death, the record industry, hypocrisy, love, consumer culture, his newfound fame, Los Angeles, America as a whole, and his own place in it all, making comparisons and references to Mara, Oedipus, and Ovid. There’s an absolutely breathtaking stanza in the song, the ninth and penultimate verse, in which Tillman recounts a near-death experience in a clothes shop to the sound of Fleetwood Mac, but I’ll get back to that later. The song is fairly skeletal, really just Tillman accompanied by sparsely integrated strings. It’s probably not the best sample if you just want a taste of Pure Comedy, on account of it taking up almost a fifth of the whole thing, but it is undoubtedly one of the highlights.
“A Bigger Paper Bag” has my favorite chorus on the album. The song concerns itself with a perhaps fictitious depiction of Father John Misty, in a world where he is internationally famous, wealthy, influential, and respected. Or maybe it’s about politicians? I don’t know.
“Oh, I was pissing on the flame
Like a child with cash or a king on cocaine
I’ve got the world by the balls
Am I supposed to behave?”
The soft verses describe following your dreams, and getting nowhere, and relying too much on the rapport system you and your significant other have built for each other. It provides a sharp contrast, but smooth transition to the hook, which is probably the only part of the record I’d actually call, for lack of a better word, badass.
“Smoochie” is one of the most sincere love songs Tillman has ever put to paper. There’s little irony to be found; it’s just a genuinely sweet song, wherein the artist wishes for his lover to console him and tell him that “concealment feeds the fear” during a mental breakdown.
“Two Wildly Different Perspectives” compares typical liberal and conservative ideologies, and how they are both destructive and regressive in their own opposite ways. The LP’s sophomore single, it best showcases the influence that Joni Mitchell appears to have had on this album, which I find is particularly apparent in the vocal melody during Tillman’s repetitions of the phrase “on both sides.”
One of my few criticisms of the album lies with the songwriting. Though wonderfully arranged, and beautifully written, I find the composition and lack of experimentation particularly concerning. This is sort of Tillman’s Achilles heel. He is a novice composer and sticks to what he knows, placing a much higher value on lyrical content than unique musicality. There is syncopation, but almost no interesting rhythms to be found in any of his music. Unbelievable, when you know that he’s a drummer and began his musical journey as a percussionist.
Moreover, the songs feel like they’re all the same tempo give or take 5 bpm. At times, the lack of variety makes the double album a slog. It’s ballad after ballad. But my gripes with it aren’t nearly enough to override my love for Pure Comedy. Hell, by lyrical measures alone, it’s brilliant - with FJM, the satirist poet, providing ironic observations of the human condition. Not to mention the gorgeous atmosphere and production in addition to the high level of musicianship.
It’s very fortunate that Father John Misty the poet shares a body with Josh Tillman the musician.
“The Memo”, the bluesy eleventh track, keeps thematically true with the cultural criticism of “Bored in the USA” and “Holy Shit”, two tracks from Honeybear, but now his skewering eye seems to range ever further across the socio-cultural gamut. Visual art, music, sports, drugs, technology, customer service: if it’s an issue in modern America, it’s in these lyrics. He appears to poke fun at the listener with the song’s quiet, chilling ambient bridge, with Tillman asking the audience if they “usually listen to music like this” and if he can “recommend any similar artists”, while a robotic voice behind his further accentuates his punchlines by giving vapid statements like “music is my life”. Is it pretentious and self-serving? Yes. Is the punchline beaten over our heads? Yes. But is the commentary funny as hell? Absolutely.
Thus we come to the penultimate outing of Pure Comedy, “So I’m Growing Old on Magic Mountain”. Here, Tillman laments the curse of aging, and the inability to do the fun things that come with it. It is, perhaps, the most genuinely sad song on the album. Tillman feels nostalgic for “drinking farmer’s potion” and “dancing in slow motion”, and so states his efforts to “grow old on Magic Mountain”, to stay young for all eternity, to never face reality. Which I guess is humorous in its own way, but this song is as serious as a heart attack. The latter half of it is inhabited by a gorgeous instrumental outro.
“These days the years thin till I can’t remember
Just what it feels like to be young forever”
It’s been said before by someone smarter than me that the two most important tracks on any album, EP, mixtape, or playlist are the opener and closer, because they’re the two songs that will shape the listener’s memory of the whole thing. And when they think of the whole thing, those two songs will be the ones they remember with clarity. Pure Comedy is on point here. Lyrically, “In Twenty Years or So” boasts Tillman’s big guns. It’s quite life-affirming, really: he poses questions regarding our tiny, tiny existence, like below:
“And what’s to regret
For a speck on a speck on a speck
Made more ridiculous the more serious he gets?”
Later in the same song, he talks about hearing a pianist play Talking Heads, and how “it’s a miracle to be alive”. See, Pure Comedy does not really concern itself with nihilism as I may have implied. It’s not “life is meaningless, so do nothing” nihilism, it’s “life is meaningless, so do all you can!” fruitless existentialism. But just remember the album title, and it’s link to the absurd. The distinction is the humor of it all. A comedy so true, it fails to be funny. A lot of what he’s saying on the album is “destroy your masters”, “let go of ego”, realize that you are just “a speck on a speck on a speck, made more ridiculous the more serious he gets”. It’s the most long-winded way anyone has ever gone about saying, “relax, man.”
But it’s hard, friends. It’s hard to watch the news and not care. People delete their Facebooks to save their sanity. That’s what we’ve become. Embrace the singularity, or die, or get really depressed trying to fight it. Robots, man. Pure comedy.
“My first memory of music’s from
The time at J.C Penney’s with my mom
The watermelon candy I was choking on
Barbara screaming, “Someone help my son!”
I relive it most times the radio’s on
That “tell me lies, sweet little white lies” song
That’s when I first saw the comedy won’t stop for
Even little boys dying in department stores”
