Father John Misty was way ahead of the curve in articulating our modern sense of despair. For more than a decade, he's been mixing nihilism with hedonism, cynicism with comedy, and cultural criticism with complicity, lamenting the state of the world while simultaneously indulging his most self-involved, ego-driven whims.
At his packed Massey Hall show, he perfected the "haha everything sux in this hellworld lmao" tone of current discourse, bringing sexy swagger to gloomy songs about capitalism and depression.
With a similar sense of lounge-lizard smoothness, Destroyer opened the night in a stripped-down incarnation. In recent years, Vancouver songwriter Dan Bejar has typically either toured as an acoustic solo act or with a large backing band; here, he split the difference, playing alongside a drummer and a guitarist, with local sax man Joseph Shabason joining in for a couple songs.
Considering that Bejar has played many of these songs with upwards of 10 backing musicians, he did an impressive job of recapturing the vibe with such a streamlined band. Joshua Wells (also of Black Mountain and Lightning Dust) was a big part of that, as he played synthesizer with his left hand while drumming with his right, weaving pillowy textures into smooth grooves on "Times Square" and "Poor in Love."
In contrast to Bejar's stripped-down lineup, Joshua Tillman took the stage with eight backing players, all of whom were some combination of a Father John Misty type dude — mostly tall, usually bearded, and all dapperly disheveled.
They began with the elegiac "Funtimes in Babylon," the very first song from FJM's first album (2012's Fear Fun). But if that suggested that this night would be about nostalgia, he quickly dispelled that idea with the very next song, "I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All." He set aside his guitar to shimmy in his super-skinny suit throughout the eight-minute funk-lounge vamp from last fall's Mahashmashana, which got the crowd gathered on the floor bobbing along.
This set the tone for a set that gave equal space for new and old, where recent material was received with just as much reverence as back catalogue cuts, and several of his best-known songs were omitted entirely. But if anyone was mad about "Real Love Baby" or "Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings" getting ignored, "Mr. Tillman" (from 2018's God's Favourite Customer) and recent blues bop "She Cleans Up" provided pop-friendly satisfaction, and the fuzzed-out chorus drops of "Screamland" were the most cathartic crescendos of the evening.
"It's really exciting to see you guys connecting with this," Tillman said deep into the evening, clearly appreciative of the way fans were vibing with the new material. For the finale of the main set, Mahashmashana's title cut was accompanied by a simple but haunting visual trick, as part of the stage's curtain fell away to reveal a gaping hole into a black void in the middle of the backdrop.
For anyone still looking for the classic cuts from his early catalogue, he gave exactly that with encore renditions of "Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)," "Holy Shit" and "I Love You, Honeybear" — it is that album's 10th anniversary after all.
While those decade-old songs are as bleak as ever, he left fans with a hope-filled silver lining. "Holy Shit" offered a "We Didn't Start the Fire"-style rundown of modern woes: "infotainment," "satirical news," "online friends." But at the end of it all, he found one thing in this shitty fucking world to feel good about: "Maybe love is just an economy based on resource scarcity / But what I fail to see is what that's gotta do with you and me?"