“The chair-bound oracle Dr. Valence can’t believe that this girl is the perfect weapon he was sent here to retrieve” — that’s quite a line. But it’s not just how Josh Tillman weaves his writerly tapestry of insanity as interdimensional vision. It’s also how he drawls it out with honeyed panache, hitting a clean falsetto on the second syllable of the word “believe.” Tillman has been doing this for a long time, reflecting his layered poetic ideas through the lens of his louche, literary Laurel Canyon lounge lizard persona.
On this six-minute reverie, Tillman gets in at least one goosebump moment — “In the expanded universe, in the crossover event, God is only as good as the villains he invents” — before the slow-motion crescendo where he conjures hosts of voices and trumpets to let us know that everyone gets saved on a bad, bad day. After all these years, Father John Misty remains a one of one. Nobody else gets down like that. —Tom
