“Mahashmashana” is cynical but has fun while doing it

By Eric Shackleford     1/14/25 10:30pm

Key track: Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose

Rating: ★★★★

This is it: your beanie-headed friend’s new favorite “underground” album. They probably mentioned that it dropped the same day as Kendrick Lamar’s surprise album “GNX”, and they definitely mispronounced the title. So just how good is it really?

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The opening titular track leaves a strong first impression. Enormous strings and bluesy saxophone create a soundscape of paradoxically triumphant resignation. In the course of this nearly ten-minute ballad, Josh Tillman sings poetically and proudly of the present-day apocalypse he sees in the world around him. He shares his pseudo-nihilistic disillusionment with self-satisfied certainty. The song’s orchestral folk style features prominently in Tillman’s previous projects under the moniker Father John Misty, but here it feels fully refined and on the grandest possible scale.

With many of the subsequent tracks, Tillman ventures away from his familiar sound in different directions. On “Screamland” he alternates a somber, slow piano with wall-of-noise crescendos featuring the loud and anguished chorus “stay young / get dumb / keep dreaming / screamland.” 

In “She Cleans Up,” Tillman tries out groove-infused alternative rock inspired by the Viagra Boys, and with “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All” he explores electric jazz fusion. These more adventurous forays don’t always feature the album's strongest songwriting, but they make for a more engaging listening experience than past projects. Even Tillman’s weakest writing manages to convey the album’s central dismay with a dose of signature wit.

Of the remaining songs, many make up for their comparative instrumental sparsity by articulating more focused criticisms. “Mental Health” lampoons the contemporary industry built around its title. Tillman closes the track with the lines “This dream, we’re born inside / Feels awful real sometimes / But it’s all in your mind,” framing “mental health” as antidotal blissful ignorance commodified for a despairing society.

The album’s peak, “Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose,” also works within a relatively limited scope. The song provides an uncomfortable, humorous and drug-infused narrative of paranoia and isolation. Instrumentally, the track features a relaxed piano and drumline punctuated by sporadic electric guitar riffs and jarring string interjections, reflecting the hidden social perils Tillman faces in the course of his trip-gone-wrong. 

Unable to drive himself home and growing increasingly leary of his host’s manipulations, Tillman wonders “Performance art? / An elaborate con? / Baby, who wears pears at 4am?” Tillman’s dose may have been an attempted exercise in escapism, but with the distance it provides he’s becoming all the more aware of the shallowness around him. As his misadventure concludes he muses “I saw something I shouldn’t see / The awful truth, bare reality / That I’d forfeit my existence / If someone let me just play with them.” The almost-jaunty cynicism of the opener has fallen away to reveal Tillman’s yearning for his past naiveté – permitting him to turn away from his bleak realizations.

“Mahashmashana” presents a hugely cynical outlook alongside the failings of drugs, dissociation and mental self-care to remedy the ensuing disillusion. Despite this, the album’s relatability and humor provide a surprisingly cathartic experience. On the whole, Tillman’s latest, sonically diverse record makes a strong case for being the best Father John Misty album yet.

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