Cosmo Jarvis - Think Bigger

We were sent over the latest release from Cosmo Jarvis, a little known solo singer/song writer amongst many other things he likes to do in his spare time.
After doing a little research, and by that I mean I looked on Facebook, I have found that Cosmo Jarvis isn’t a professional musician and instead forces himself to learn an instrumental part to a song when the time is needed, truly dedicating himself to his work to make each track sound the way he wants it to.
Anyway on to the important stuff, how good is this little known solo artist from Devon? Well, he is pretty damn good if you ask me, and here is why.
Kicking off with a funky little number called ‘Love This’ Cosmo pulls you into his own little world made up of beautiful instrumental work and a soothing voice that even your mother would listen to.
After hearing a fair few albums of similar genre I was expecting the album to follow the same genre layout throughout but Cosmo shakes it up a little bit with the second track ‘Train Downtown’ by adding in some rougher vocals to appeal to the more ‘Hardcore’ fans who don’t listen to anything unless it has an angry man with daddy issues on the end of the microphone.
‘Tell Me Who to Be’ is the third track, and at the point of writing this I wasn’t really planning on going into a track by track review, but I may as well now. This is a solid track, beautifully written and sang with a blend of many instrumental sounds to bless your ears, granted this may not appeal to most people but if you go in with an open mind I think you will really enjoy it.
The next track is called ‘Lacie’ which I think is a song about Cosmo’s cat. If you listen to the lyrics it kind of makes sense. Music wise it’s a bit of a dull sounding track to be honest, not the best work on the album it drags the previous tracks down and is ultimately going to end up being one of the tracks that are skipped on your mp3 player, this should most definitely be ‘put to sleep’ as Cosmo sings about in the song.
‘Sunshine’ is up next, which sounds like a cross between a western and a pirate shanty, but sounds fucking epic! Cosmo changes his vocal style from a
soothing, calming sound to a rougher, grittier sound and it all really blends together perfectly, nothing really compares to the sound, it is very unique sounding, a blast of fresh air in a clouded music industry surrounded by the same sounding shit.
The vocal format carries on into the next track, ‘Good Citizen’ which for me is another flop in an otherwise flawless album, it sounds like a cheesy generic rock track, and that’s all I will say about that because my mum taught me not to say anything if I have nothing good to say.
‘Friend of the Devil’ is next on the hit list and redeems the album from the previous track, a very folk rock sounding track that is completely out of the blue showing that Cosmo is very flexible with his writing and singing and can literally do anything he puts his mind to.
‘Hopeless Bay’ is track number eight and has an echoed vocal effect throughout and slightly reminds me of something that would be featured on a Toy Story film, a very Randy Newman feel to it.
The next two tracks are very similar in sound format and basically return some consistency to the albums sound, which in this case isn’t really what you would want, after experiencing a wild mix of genres I think a few more genres thrown in would have been awesome.
Finally , the title track ‘Think Bigger’ closes the album, again a high pitched echo vocal style with a soothing sound, it is always risky picking a title track and I don’t think Cosmo made the right call with this one, I think ‘Tell Me Who to Be’ is a very strong contender for that job, which is easily my favourite track on the album and possibly one of my top ten I have heard this year, beautiful track.
All in all a very, very good album with some crazy genre mixes, an awesome talent has been discovered and we will definitely keep an eye on his future endeavours.
RIFF FINAL RATING: R R R R