Humour, sweetness and sincerity: Father John Misty’s Chloë and the Next Twentieth Century reviewed

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Jonathan Sacerdoti

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In which Josh Tillman reimagines the whole back catalogue of 20th-century American pop music (except for rock), tilting heavily in favour of the 1930s-1950s. Lush strings, polite jazz and sometimes cocktail piano, big band stuff etc., plus the expected Tillman mordant humour and some unexpected sweetness and sincerity. There’s the country torch of Patsy Cline on ‘Kiss Me (I Loved You)’, the cabaret samba of ‘Olvidado (Otro Momento)’, Rodgers’ and Hart’s ‘My Funny Valentine’ homage on ‘Funny Girl’, and what we’re told is an attempt to kind of rewrite Fred Neil’s ‘Everybody’s Talkin’’ on ‘Goodbye Mr Blue’. The problem? If you hold yourself up before a century of classics on a single album, you’re bound to fall short.