I actually wanted to write something similar about two years ago, on Chris Cornell’s then newly-released fourth studio album Higher Truth -- not quite a review, rather a loosely-gathered clump of pretentious euphemisms and cliché platitudes about how music and life sometimes converge and feed the listener’s sense of self-importance in strange and unexpected ways.
Indeed, 2015 was something of an interesting year for me, and I suppose I found enough catharsis in Cornell’s album, a collection of folksy tunes on heartbreak and lovelorn reclamation, to consider committing a few words to print.
After a year and a half worth of procrastination, here I am again: Listening to an album day-in and day-out, obsessively picking out all the little bits of words and melodies that resonate (which happens to be all of them). The album in question is Father John Misty’s Pure Comedy; an artist whose work I’ve had a few pleasant brushes with but mostly wrote off as yet another “21st-century strummy American folkster with hipster facial hair” -- you know the kind. It’s amazing how fulfilling things become when you harbour no expectations.
Not only is Pure Comedy the best album I’ve heard all year (so far), it’s one of those records which, in 20 years or so, I can safely picture gracing some beige-coloured, moodily-lit “hall of fame” wall alongside great work such as Neil Young’s Harvest and Jeff Buckley’s Grace.
It’s an incredible record, and any music critic worth his salt will be able to attest to that, at least from a production standpoint, with tunes which aren’t afraid to house sweeping orchestral pomp alongside the subdued thump of a lone acoustic guitar -- all accompanied by the soft-spoken yet commanding voice of singer Josh Tillman.
But this is an album where conventional topics of discourse need not apply. Pure Comedy is a deeply personal piece of work that deserves to be appreciated at a deeply personal level.
When an album starts off with the words “The comedy of man starts like this …” you stop whatever else it was you were doing and pay attention to what the voice on the other side of the speaker has to say.
You might go in expecting a cantankerous, preachy rant on everything that’s wrong with the human race, and to a certain extent that expectation is fulfilled, only to have it all be undone with a tearful, defeated admission of how, despite all our flaws and everything that really is wrong with how humanity has, for want of a better word, progressed, in the end the only thing that keeps most of us from putting a bullet through a temple is knowing that our misery is shared.
I’ve been listening to Pure Comedy during every waking moment for a good number of days now -- on my way to work, at work, on my way home from work, in bed trying to fall asleep, in the shower before I leave for work, ad nauseam. And while the music is most definitely a large part of why I haven’t been able to extract myself from it, it’s one of the few times that I’ve been this focused on the songwriting more than anything.
Make no mistake, there’s no profundity to be found here, Tillman’s songwriting is shamelessly clumsy and refreshingly blunt, but that’s exactly why it’s so easy to get sucked into his jaundiced outlook of the world at large.
In times as divisive such as ours, cracking a smile is a near Herculean task, and that is exactly the kind of myth that Tillman tries to dispel. There’s nothing special about 2017, we’ve always been miserable creatures, and nothing will change that, not a better government, or even, perhaps, a healthier planet -- and it’s all so goddamn hilarious.
The commentary on display threatens to almost become a caricature of itself, but deftly avoids being as such due in part to Tillman’s sardonic sense of self-awareness. He knows how much of a cliché it is to wax poetic on the ailments of humanity, and he knows how rich it is to be someone in the position that he is: “Another white guy in 2017 … Who takes himself so goddamn seriously …”
As I write this, it’s hard to escape the irony of commenting on Tillman’s work, with an entire track dedicated as an ode to people like myself (“Ballad of the Dying Man”), culture commentators riding on the coattails of artists and creators, trying to decide what’s worth someone’s time and what isn’t.
Much like falling in love with a depressive, listening to Pure Comedy can feel maddening, frustrating, and, oftentimes, even utterly pointless … yet you return, if not for the hope that your love does not go unrequited, then definitely for the sheer fascination of it all.
Listen to the full album: http://tinyurl.com/k7zssaw
Rubaiyat Kabir is an Editorial Assistant at Dhaka Tribune. Follow him on Twitter @moreanik.
