Details of the new Father John Misty album have begun to emerge: It will be called Pure Comedy, it will be released on March 31st on Sub Pop and the cover looks like this [see above]. A video for the title track has just dropped. Directed by Matthew Donald Siskin, it heralds the coming apocalypse of our Bozo Republic, now that its Cheeto-tinted Idiot-Messiah/Anti-Christ has been enthroned, with a combination of primitive neo-Hieronymous Bosch doodles (presumably inked by FJM’s Josh Tillman) along with found footage chronicling the accelerating decline of Western Civilization. This is a state of the art 21st Century protest song. On a personal note, we are honored that Tillman and the filmmakers saw fit to use a brief excerpt of the footage we shot of his controversial anti-Trump rant at WXPN’s XPoNential Fest last summer at the 4:55 mark. So honored that we are not even going to sue. Well, probably not. Just kidding. Mostly. Anyway, enjoy.
PREVIOUSLY: When Father John Misty took the River Stage at WXPN’s XPoNential Music Festival last night it became immediately apparent that wasn’t going to deliver a conventional set of pastoral folk rock ballads for an adoring crowd of dad rockers in khaki cargo shorts. “What the fuck is going on?!” he bellowed, refusing the guitar a roadie tried to hand to him. The bearded troubadour glided right past his mic stand with a long, lanky stride, and with a lit cigarette smoking between his fingers perched himself on a sound monitor, poised to confront the crowd. This was not the time for hymns. The pastor was about to preach.
American democracy has demonstrably devolved into naked fascism and raw farce, he said, and he could not and would not fiddle while Rome burned. No, he came to talk about despair. It was, he said, the only reasonable response to this moment, even if it was a “less sexy festival look.”
“Some people [came] to get some brief diversion from the heaviness of politics,” he noted, before chiding their complacency, “do you people realize we have an entertaining tyrant happening right now?”
“I am deeply off script right now,” he said, refusing to accede to the fans waiting anxiously for him to launch into his first song. “Are we just supposed to have a blues chili-off right now, and just wait for someone hilarious to say something hilarious that makes us feel better about it for a second? Do we think that our hilarious tyrant is going to be met with a hilarious revolution that is won by hilarious revolutionaries, and the whole thing is going to be like entertaining as fuck the whole time?” MORE
PREVIOUSLY: I Went To Father John Misty’s House And All I Got Was Stoned…And This 7,156 Word Magnum Opus