I Am the Cosmos

by

Chris Bell

Edit

I'll start off by saying i'm glad that at least 14 other people own this record. Music this good does not deserve to be so obscure but alas... The other thing I must say is that I want more. I want more original Big Star stuff, more Chris Bell stuff but that's only a wish. This album of mostly unreleased material is all that's left of Chris Bell music-wise and it's a shame. Recorded in pieces between his departure from Big Star and his death in 1978, this album is full of hook laden power pop and emotional accoustic and mid tempo songs. To me,the album's best track is "I Got Kinda Lost". If life was fair this would have been a hit-it's one of my favorite songs recorded during the 70's. It's an urgent song that nearly jumps out at you and it all comes together in such an amazing way. Another great "rocker" is "I don't know why". Stick with me on this but it's a song Aerosmith COULD have recorded somewhere around this time (it even has a cowbell). Of course, being inferior in every way, they never found a way to create a song this interesting or flat out good. The heavier songs are a nice fit against the reflective,slower songs. "Though I Know She Lies" is just stone beautiful. It's like a number of the songs on this album and in the Big Star catalog (both with and without Bell), they have a sadness built into them. The tittle track, "There Was A Light", "You And Your Sister" and "Better Save Yourself" all share it. They are all great songs but also bittersweet. "Better Save Yourself" in particular is so sad that it would have been perfect for Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers. The slower songs are peppered with insightful lyrics and good music plus Bell's passionate (if high pitched) vocals. The album has a few weak tracks but as they say, the weakest moments here are are better than most others best stuff. That said,I think this album is better than any Alex Chilton solo album(not including Third)-it's more focused and inspired. I don't care about which one was the better artist really, I'm just glad I became fans of both. Chris Bell IS the best singer/songwriter you've new heard of. As others have said-the liner notes by his brother David are about the best around. Read with dismay about how a man this talented ended up managing his father's restarant shortly before he died. Discover I Am The Cosmos. (p.s I'm sorry I mentioned Aerosmith)

First off, Amazon gives you inaccurate information about "I Am The Cosmos." Except for "I Am The Cosmos" and "You And Your Sister," none of these tracks saw the light of day before 1992, when the CD appeared. (The single of "Cosmos" b/w "You And Your Sister" appeared on the tiny Car Records label in 1978; that single is pretty rare these days. And some of the material on the CD circulated on fans' tapes during the '80s.) Be that as it may (and it points out how obscure Chris Bell was, and is), "I Am The Cosmos" is an intermittently great album. A lot of people, myself included, believe Big Star was basically Bell's idea, but Bell clearly didn't have the finesse of Alex Chilton. A lot of this is weak in the way that the lesser tracks on a Badfinger album are weak, and a good bit of it is pallid folk-rock. Bell's voice is just too high-pitched for me over the long haul, which is why the Bell-Chilton collaboration worked so well. Still, the incredible "I Don't Know" is power-pop at its most frenetic and rhythmic, "I Got Kinda Lost" oughta be covered by somebody, and "Make A Scene" evokes Sunday afternoons, apartments with wooden floors, and too much valium as well as any other pop artifact from the Seventies. Bell clearly wanted to be a part of the British Invasion so badly that his music came out curiously hermetic. But the best tracks stand with Big Star as an interesting update, or gloss, or footnote, to the more popular work of the Beatles, the Byrds, or the Zombies. Big Star and Chris Bell clearly deserve the appellation "classic," even if only professional Pop Theorists will ever hear them.