It is all too easy for Josh Tillman, aka Father John Misty, the hirsute New Orleans crooner who has lately found solo fame after stints with acts such as Fleet Foxes and Damien Jurado.
His rich, honeyed voice reverberated in the Opera House’s concert hall on Tuesday, effortlessly enough that he could cajole the audience, throw gestures and chuck guitars about the stage mid-song, sometimes even mid-chorus.
The acoustics were gorgeous, but not even Tillman’s extraordinary talents as a showman could overcome the venues limitations, at least for a rock show.
He writhed on his back, sashayed across staged, thrust his rakish limbs in the sky, at the crowd – anything to eke energy out of the Sydney audience. Confined in their seats they could give little back. “It seems a little flat in here,” he remarked at one point, pining for his nightly dose of “wildly disproportionate affirmation”.
Tillman peppered the show with droll observations, the same that make up his songwriting, especially on his second album, I Love You Honeybear, where the distance between his angelic vocals and detached, dry lyrics is most pronounced.
“This next song is a deeply sarcastic meta-ballad about despair,” he said of Bored in the USA. The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment, a laundry list of a lover’s terrible qualities, he called “the most despicable thing I ever wrote”. Himself he described either as a Grammy nominee (for best special limited edition package, announced Tuesday morning) or as a “homeless Chris Isaak”.
By concert’s end the knees of Tillman’s suit had worn but his energy was unstinting. He held a Q and A. “Is this venue boring?” one wag asked. “I mean, that’s up to you guys,” Tillman replied.
• Father John Misty plays the Forum, Melbourne on 9 and 10 December
