Cultureberg has heard it said that all cynics are fallen idealists. Maybe so. Whatever their position on the continuum, artists continue to cling to a belief , however compromised, of the power of their work to bring about change. Or they shut up.
Josh Tillman, the possibly real person behind FJM, had split from a religious college and was doing dead end jobs when he landed the drum stool with Fleet Foxes. "Hoŵ could you not think, like, 'I'm saved'," he says. "When I joined that band I dreamt that if I could just play music for a living I could be happy. But I really have to watch my miraculous thinking because I was so disillusioned that it didn't end up being this version of it that I had in my head. I didn't feel enlarged by that experience, I felt diminished."
Those who have cocked an ear to Mr Misty will be unsurprised by this admission, or be surprised that his third album, Pure Comedy, is both more grandiloquent and more jaundiced than its predecessors. It seems to be an extension of the social commentary of Bored in the USA and the stateside conversations he has treated festival crowds to.
Through a seeming random confluence of factors Pure Comedy dropped (in modern parlance) whilst I was reading Flannery O Connor's Wise Blood. It occured to me that there were a number of similarities between the two works which went deeper than the black suits and the self-appointed mendicant preacher role.
Whilst Wise Blood seems a less prevalent set text for the cognoscenti than in my youth, its atmosphere haunts many modern films and tv series, with the now de-rigeur demented preacher and retinue of gawking hayseeds a shortcut to The Banality of Evil. We notet that there is a spoken word track on Kevin Morby's new album taken from The Violent Bear It Away Perhaps Ms O Connor is due a revival. John Huston nailed the books atmosphere in his 1979 film, with Brad Dourif's defining role as protagonist Hazel Motes, alongside an array of sweaty character actors. The hermetic world of cracker Pentecostal mysticism also infuses early Nick Cave (especially his first novel, And The Ass Saw The Angel), and is visible in the music of 16 Horsepower, Lift To Experience, The Gun Club and many others. The defining characteristic of these bands is a purist embrace of the transcendence which Hazel Motes is seeking in a world of sideshow shucksters and predatory hustlers. Wise Blood World is all around.
Wise Blood is a fable, almost a parable. Hazel Motes returns to the South from the army and begins to proselytise for his own Church Without Christ, a secular religion which attempts to deny the need to accept that Jesus died for anyone's sins. Hazel is single-minded, contrary and retains a a skeptical intensity in his dealing with the misfit diaspora he encounters, descending into a grotesque world of mock prophets and pecuniary landladies. Dear Reader, I do not need to write Spoiler Alert as you will have doubtless guessed that all does not end well.
One could draw a parallel between, on the one hand, Hazel Motes' preaching falling on deaf ears as he stands on a car roof or addresses a meagre cinema queue with, on the other, FJM hunkering at the lip of festival stages addressing the emptiness of corporate entertainment and the ills of artisan sculpted existence. They spring from a similar pool.
Mr Misty recognises this. "My spiritual gift is my skepticism and my cynicism and my sense of humour and my penchant for stirring shit up. That's what I have to offer the world."
His newest offering to the world is his most considered and expansive yet. It is 13 songs stretched over 75 minutes; the longest, the most autobiographical (probably) Leaving LA, is 13 minutes long.
It's a Big Statement. FJM characterises his past oeuvre as "four in the morning, drunk in bed with pizza hanging out of my mouth" songs, as compared to the new album, a culmination of ideas he has been refining all his life. There are ideas about God, human venality, the temporary nature of existence, politics, stupidity, philosophy, modern frivolity and more. There is even an essay outling some of the songs' underpnnings. Ye Gods! It's a concept album.
Indeed, the first couple of listens left Cultureberg awash in wordiness, willful irony and grandiose locquacity. Thankfully subsequent listens reveal more humour, less archness, more self-deprecation and the melodic heft of the rather slow paced songs hoves into view. For someone who admits he always "preferred the speaking parts" to learning the G chord, it's a huge bonus that the songs settings are engaging and hook-filled. The more one listens, the more little details of musicality appear from behind the monoliths of the lyrics. It can still be a tiring and demanding listen to take in on one sitting, mind. The lyrics address big topics - the internet on Total Entertainment Forever, political chicanery on Two Wildly Different Perspectives, solipsism and hyper-critical hipsters on Ballad of the Dying Man - and whilst Cultureberg still prefers the pizza stained canyon noir of Fear Fun, it would be churlish not to tip the hat to the ambition, craft and application on display. Whilst not as didactic as being addressed by an emissary of the Church Without Christ, Pure Comedy at times skirts close to preachiness. It reminded Cultureberg a bit of Roy Harper, a favourite of FJMs producer, Jonathon Wilson.
Mr Misty is a big personality, and has perhaps eclipsed the influence of Mr Wilson, but one can note the wide thematic sweep of the producers 2011 debut Gentle Spirit and the Floydian glide which informed its 2013 successor Fanfare. (As a footnote, Mr Wilson has been recruited to play guitar in Roger Water's touring band) The sharp dissection of human folly echoes (geddit?) The Wall or Animals. Also drafted in is Gavin Bryars for striking string arrangements, so whilst the dyspeptic, dystopian lyrics are the immediate focus, the more contemplative musical settings also linger in the mind.
Whether this will play well in the even larger venues Mr Misty is guesting at later in the year wll be worth watching. Cultureberg has seen the FJM Show 5 times now and he is adept at projecting a complex personality/creation into the crowd and back to row WW. Pure Comedy is almost a Greatcoat Album for terminal adolescents to pore over, to rank with staples of slope shouldered sixth form shufflers. Whether it is Dark Side Of The Moon or Crime Of The Century remains to be seen. Regardless, FJM has alchemised his skepticism and Cynicism into art and somewhere Hazel Motes is tipping his hat.
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