Father John Misty - Chloë And The Next 20th Century

There was a brief period of time, following the breakthrough success of 2015’s ‘I Love You, Honeybear’ and into 2017’s ‘Pure Comedy’, when the character of Father John Misty began to yield infinitely more column inches than the music Josh Tillman was creating. Such is the curse of the instinctively quotable, but the singer’s wit was never only in his withering internet presence. It’s hard to think of another modern musician whose brain moves in the strange, funny, satirising way that could produce recent single ‘Q4’ - a self-contained soap opera about a writer milking her dead sister’s trauma to flog a Christmas best seller, only to get swiftly cancelled. Buoyed by a sweeping string section and mellifluous harpsichords, it’s a playful highlight in an album full of them.