On a busy block of East Avenue Friday evening, a line of painfully hip patrons snakes from the door of Anthology, one of Rochester’s newest music venues, and well around the corner. After a curiously long wait outside—the opening act already began—the queue hiccups to life and crams inside the long hall of the theater. As the half-hour lull before the main act comes to a close, a troupe of slender men step out onto the stage, into their positions. My friend chuckles as he scans over them—minor variations on a white, lanky, black-clad, wild-haired, full-bearded theme. “Is that a joke?” he muses, and I’m wondering the same; the outfits are far too similar to be accidental. And, moments later, the lankiest, hairiest, beardiest of them all emerges to the crowd’s elation—the man of the evening has arrived. Father John Misty, the smarmy folk-rock alter-ego of Joshua Tillman, has roared across the country in recent months touring in support of his critically-acclaimed sophomore album, “I Love You, Honeybear,” and now he’s come here. It’s a concept album, inspired both by Tillman’s marriage in 2014 to a photographer named Emma with his publicly, shamelessly hedonistic lifestyle as a backdrop.
And from the cymbal crash that blows the doors off the first song, it’s clear that the grizzly anti-hero is a born performer. Tillman enunciates every song with his whole body, whether it’s draping the mic stand over his shoulder or leaping atop the drum kit to shimmy with his back to the crowd. It’s the showiest show I’ve seen in ages, and, somehow, through his flawless deadpan, you can guess he’s probably enjoying himself most of all. On the deceptively saccharine “The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apartment,” he tells the tale of a one-night stand with a fawning fan in the most scathing terms imaginable: “Of the few main things I hate about her / one’s her petty, vogue ideas.” He delivers each line in a feel-good cadence that belies the mean-spirited lyrics themselves—each uncomfortably specific critique matched to limp-wristed hand motions of disgust and the rankled face of a guy nauseated by the weight of his own antipathies. It’s the sort of act that’d come off as either try-hard or just plain abrasive in the hands of a less self-aware artist, but Tillman nails it in a manner that’s genuinely hilarious.
Given his propensity for public antics, I’m itching to see how a personality like Tillman’s will interact with the crowd. And none of it disappoints—between songs, he invites “questions, comments or concerns” from the audience, chews out vape bros spewing noxious grape-clouds at the stage and plucks the smartphone from the hands of an up-front fan, filming himself for the rest of the song and slipping it into his jacket pocket, to be returned much later.
On the other end of the spectrum, Tillman gives his poignant side just enough time to shine through. Slower numbers, like “Funtimes in Babylon,” the opener of his excellent 2012 album, “Fear Fun,” and “I Went to the Store One Day,” a solo acoustic portrait of the day he met his wife, are effortlessly moving. Against all the evening’s acidic humor, it’s gratifying to see them delivered with the respect they deserve. But, above all, it’s the moments where that emotion is interwoven with tragicomic irony that Father John Misty hits hardest: the peak comes at the end of the bitter piano ballad “Bored in the USA.” In the song’s studio recording, a laugh track bubbles up beneath his complaints of “a useless education / a subprime loan / a craftsman home,” laying bare the pitiful absurdity of a well-off white dude’s sense of entitlement. But, at the show, it’s the audience—including yours truly—providing the laugh track. Between each plaintive line, we all errupt in forced guffaws, buoying a song that itself is a takedown of well-off twenty-somethings with time, money and breath to waste. It’s sad because it’s funny (because it’s sad), and as I glance around in every direction, I see the same signals on every face—ones that aren’t quite sure we’re not laughing at ourselves.
McGuire is a member of
the class of 2018.
