Cosmo Jarvis
Every now and then a new artist comes along that blows me away. Cosmo Jarvis is fresh, new and diverse. He structures songs with a lyrical genius; at times angst-ridden at others tongue-in-cheek. The debut album is split into two halves, as Cosmo explains himself!
The first, ‘Humasyouhitch’ you might call the ‘fun’ side, packed with playful vignettes of sexual awakening or as Cosmo self-deprecatingly puts it, songs written “when I was discovering I had a penis and girls had vaginas and all that kind of thing.” The songs capture both the awkwardness and the ecstasy with a deftness of phrase rarely found.
‘Jessica Alba’s Number’ is a light-hearted romp through the fantasy little black book of billboard girls that Cosmo will probably never date. ‘Mel’s Song’ is dedicated to a girl who, while probably more obtainable, still seems to be just out of reach. Meanwhile, ‘She’s Got You’ is a cautionary tale to a former friend who, on falling in love, apparently forgot that he also had friends and a personality of his own.
But it’s on the other side, ‘Sonofabitch’, that Cosmo really demonstrates the wisdom lurking in a heart that’s not so much dark as immensely human. ‘Sort Yourself Out’ is a tale of feeling old before your time that will resonate with people of any age. ‘Mummy’s Been Drinking’ shows a skill for storytelling, but the astonishing centre piece of the album has to be ‘Problems Of Our Own’. Its woozy sing-along and rapped verses cloak an impossibly bleak story of family breakdown made all the more bruising by the fact that it’s based, at least in part, on Cosmo’s own family life. He explains: “I could have just written it like that and used all the names but I didn’t want to do that so I wrote it as a story to make it applicable to everyone.
The album was released by Wall of Sound in November 2009 and slowly it’s crept up on me. Cosmo is out on tour with Sunshine Underground through February. See Myspace for details!
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