Father John Misty: The End Is Near, Sing All About It

Think things are dire? So does Joshua Tillman, the songwriter who is releasing “Pure Comedy,” his third album as Father John Misty. The title of “Pure Comedy” is one of the album’s very few jokes, a bit of blunt irony for an all-too-persuasive set of songs envisioning global catastrophe as the inevitable result of human nature. Singing with earnest clarity, Father John Misty indicts selfishness, ignorance, distraction, vanity, politics, self-delusion, dogmatism, technocracy, God and, by no means least, himself.

Midway through the album, like a roadblock, is “Leaving L.A.,” a plaintive 13-minute dirge with lyrics that accurately describe it as “some 10-verse chorus-less diatribe.” It’s morose, but also plush; Mr. Tillman croons those 10 verses atop soothing string-section arrangements. And the song grows into an acutely self-conscious, autobiographical portrait of where Mr. Tillman finds himself now, questioning his own role as a songwriter, careerist and maybe artist, or, as he sarcastically puts it, “Another white guy in 2017/Who takes himself so goddamn seriously.”

The album is a self-questioning singer-songwriter’s reaction to the beginning of the Trump years, interrogating himself and his listeners about what culture can possibly accomplish. At a Father John Misty performance on July 23, the day after Mr. Trump’s dystopian convention speech accepting the Republican nomination, Mr. Tillman cut his set short and gave a harangue, complaining about entertainment “numbing” its consumers and ranting about how “stupidity just [expletive] runs the world.”

On the album, he extrapolates further in “Total Entertainment Forever,” envisioning a world where the pleasures of virtual reality have entirely supplanted real life:

“When the historians find us we’ll be in our homes
Plugged into our hubs
Skin and bones
A frozen smile on every face.”

Mr. Tillman has recorded extensively since 2003 as J. Tillman and has been in and out of bands, including a stint as the drummer in Fleet Foxes. He uses the Father John Misty name as both a mouthpiece and a persona, as a questionable character navigating an overripe, compromised world. The song that opened Father John Misty’s 2012 debut, “Fear Fun,” was “Funtimes in Babylon,” a sardonic embrace of Hollywood excess. Mr. Tillman had a strict religious upbringing that he broke away from, but he is still making moral arguments.

Father John Misty is also a musical throwback. His bleak contemporary tidings arrive in rich, retro settings. The sound harks back to the late 1960s and early 1970s era of singer-songwriters, particularly those who were clustered around Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles and living a hippie dream of self-expression and self-indulgence, amid vintage guitars and well-equipped studio hideaways.

It was an era of analog recording and idealized natural sounds. Mr. Tillman has produced all three Father John Misty albums with Jonathan Wilson, who meticulously recreates the era’s wood-grained, acoustic resonances of guitars, pianos and hand-played drums; string and horn sections are on call, and wobbly analog electronic tones often hover in the background. It sounds like there’s homemade organic granola and a stash of Michoacán weed in the studio kitchen.

But the singer-songwriter years were more optimistic and inward looking (at least on LPs; at the same time the Vietnam War raged on and economic crisis set in). Father John Misty has the digital onslaught of the 21st century, and its consequences, to contend with. The title song of “Pure Comedy,” a piano ballad with echoes of Randy Newman, is a visitor’s view of humankind, marveling at our theological delusions and self-destructive follies: “They build fortunes poisoning their offspring/And hand out prizes when someone patents the cure.”

“Birdie,” a waltz set in an echoey firmament, anticipates a “world written in lines of code,” free of human differences or enigmas, with “Life as just narrative/Metadata in aggregate.” And in “The Memo,” which starts out quietly folky and expands to cinematic scale, he mocks a culture of phoniness, hype and social-media narcissism: “Come binge on radiant blandness at the disposable feast,” he taunts. The song that closes the album, “In Twenty Years or So” posits that humankind only has about two decades left before its “violent end”; in the meantime, over shimmering strings, Mr. Tillman’s voice rises into sweet falsetto to try and contend, “There’s nothing to fear.”

The music stays cozy, supportive and unobtrusively inventive, placing luminous details behind Mr. Tillman’s sympathetic, ever melodic voice. But Father John Misty doesn’t offer even the cold comforts of self-righteousness or cynical punch lines, much less solutions. “Pure Comedy” is a poised, polished, thoughtful scream of despair.