Cosmo Jarvis – Humasyouhitch/Sonofabitch
Cosmo Jarvis
It’s hard not to listen to Cosmo Jarvis and find yourself mulling on how things used to be better, way back when. When Kate Bush was signed aged 16, she spent most of her advance, and most of the following two years, taking interpretive dance classes and mime training. EMI, the theory goes, were happy waiting for her creative talents to mature (and her education to be completed) rather than forcing her into a substandard early release that would inevitably frame the remainder of her career.
That’s not to suggest that, had EMI exercised less restraint, Bush would have preceded Cosmo Jarvis by using a fart as a record intro and singing lyrics like, “Come stay with me/Stay in my room/My duvet smells but so would you/If you hadn’t washed in as long as I haven’t/I’ll wash my balls if you’ll say that you’ll grab them”. Or whatever the female equivalent might be. Nor are we suggesting that, given a few years of performance art training, Jarvis would metamorphisise into a soprano toting, operatic diva. But he might at least shed his self-aware teenage blather and deliver lyrics at least on a par with his exuberantly catchy pop tunes.
Putting aside lyrics that make you want to lever out your ear drums with a rusty spoon, there is no denying that Jarvis possesses a prodigious talent for writing engaging, toe-tapping, chirpy songs that would have little difficulty in challenging the pap that occupied 90% of the singles charts. His ability to hop from style to style, burnishing everything from reggae to bluegrass to pub rock with a glottal-stopped Jamie T sheen, is genuinely impressive. Even the Paul Simon pan pipes ‘She’s Got You’ work. The difficulty is, the lyrics are relentless.
Born in the States and improbably relocated to Totnes, Devon, Jarvis (full name Harrison Cosmo Krikoryan Jarvis; how much better would ‘Krikoryan’ have been as a stage name?) is clearly so conscious of being a teenager, it’s become his sole topic. Take ‘Clean My Room’: “I’m so sick of worrying about my age/I might die young but I still got this lovely day/Might do something to help someone/My time on earth has just begun”. In a similar vein, ‘Jessica Alba’s Number’ sees Jarvis in drearily familiar teenage fantasy territory, made all the more excruciating by layers of self aware self-deprecation, while ‘Kate Was ‘Ere’, ‘Get Happy’ and ‘Clean My Room’ are all littered with references to teenage bedrooms and downloading porn.
Which brings us back to Bush. What might have become of Jarvis if Wall of Sound managing director Mark Jones hadn’t opted to launch him straight into the public eye, instead waiting until he had more to sing about? It’s unlikely we’d have got The Kick Inside (Cosmo Jarvis’ website appears to show him trying to urinate in his own mouth – an altogether more challenging starting point than the thoughtful 16-year old Bush) but his songs might still have achieved a broader appeal than this current collection.
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