It’s not uncommon to see some absurd bullshit in today’s world, but it is uncommon to see it, describe it in excruciating detail, and laugh.
That’s what Father John Misty (born Josh Tillman) does on 2015’s I Love You, Honeybear, which laces together lyrics so pessimistic (“Love is just an institution based on human frailty”) and lines so ridiculous (“I wonder if she even knows what that word means / Well, it’s literally not that”) that you can’t help but snicker at the contrast. Tillman sings his mercurial observations over a sprawling baroque-rock orchestra, which he stuffs to the brim with a full string section and mariachi band. The lush instrumentation is lipstick on the lyrics’ snarky nihilism, and pokes fun at our world’s obsession with performance and consumption.
But this glamorous dress-up is nowhere to be found on I Love You, Honeybear Demos, etc., which was released last week in honor of the album’s 10th anniversary. The original songs’ thick layers of instrumentation are gone, and only their stripped-down exoskeletons remain. What’s left is dusty with reverb and accidental distortion, featuring little more than Tillman’s voice, a guitar, and loose guidelines for how some of the music might be filled in down the road.
This is not the lighthearted satire that Tillman put out in 2015, not the kind of album that takes the world’s moral depravity and packages it into a funny record from Sub-Pop’s latest indie darling. This is the sound of actual resentment, actual hopelessness, actual despair at how fucked up the world can be, coated with no gloss or sugar. It’s curious that it only takes a mariachi band to turn a scathing critique of modernism into a best-selling collection of hipster anthems.
