After years of touring with Fleet Foxes and doing anonymous indie-folk under his birth name, J. Tillman woke up from God knows what torpor and dropped the equivalent of an entire career of good ideas into a single record. He should have saved some for his next ones, but damn it, the result is glorious! Tillman vibrates a little on the same frequency as Gram Parsons, but his caustic verve belongs to him alone. It is an end-of-an-era album, a hymn to the resilience of the marginalized, coupled with a cynical look at the void in front of us.
