God Himself, however, gets off more lightly than He perhaps deserves in “When The God Of Love Returns There’ll Be Hell To Pay”, a tour of the deity’s handiwork: “Try something this ambitious next time you get bored,” suggests Tillman. The tone of mordant contempt is underscored by the strings behind his piano, and punched home by an epiphanic burst of horns, before he ends with the slimmest thread of hope, “I hate to say it, but each other’s all we’ve got”. “Pure Comedy” may be the most fulsome indulgence of Tillman’s youthful fantasies of becoming a preacher (he grew up an evangelical Christian), though ironically its chief target is religious obsession, and the danger posed by people whose “idea of being free is a prison of beliefs they never have to leave”. Tillman’s frustration with showbiz is revisited in “The Memo” and “Total Entertainment Forever”, which mockingly acclaim a new age of perpetual distraction and constant demands for online feedback, while elsewhere his attention shifts to a broader canvas of discontent, heralded by the opening title track. “Leaving LA” is the centrepiece of Pure Comedy, a bleak and bitter survey of modern times whose closest comparison is probably Neil Young’s On The Beach. “You can hear it all over the airwaves,” he sings, “the manufactured gasp of the final days.” Mind you, the song in question, “Leaving LA”, is 13 minutes long, a weary denunciation of “LA phonies and their bullshit bands” who “sound like dollar signs and Amy Grant”, set to strummed acoustic guitar and woozy string drones. Last July, on the eve of the Republican Convention, Josh Tillman – aka Father John Misty – was due to perform at a festival in New Jersey, but instead took the opportunity to vent his anger at what he later described as the “demonic clown pageant coronation of our next potential Idiot King” with a lengthy harangue about the impotence of entertainment, before singing just one song of his own and abruptly closing with a rendition of “Bird On The Wire”.
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