Cosmo's Joke's on Me — An Album Review

IIn the last ninety seconds of Joke's on Me's closing track — the title song, on which Cosmo sounds his most fragile — the band drops out. Just an acoustic guitar and a voice. He has been singing about himself for thirty-eight minutes by this point. Other things, too — kitchens being remodeled, auto-replies, the sound of being on hold — but the through-line is him, and how the things that happened to him happened. The last verse is the simplest one on the record. It says, more or less: nothing worked out, and most of it is funny, and a few of the things weren't funny, and that's also fine. Then the guitar goes away. Then the voice goes away. Then there's about three seconds of silence before the record loops back to track one, which sounds, on second listen, like a different song than the one you started with.

This is a good album.

I'll get to the rest of the review. First: the apartment.

Cosmo lives above a record store. I won't tell you exactly where. The apartment is one room, and the room is records — leaning, stacked, on every surface. There is a turntable on a low credenza. There are two guitars. There are plants. There are two cats. There is a cluttered side table next to an olive-velvet armchair. The chair faces a window that faces a quiet street.

He wrote and recorded most of Joke's on Me in this room. You can hear it. The album sounds like it was made by one person who had access to other very good musicians but mostly worked alone at night with the window open.

If you've read about Cosmo, you know the backstory: a goat in his sixties, thirty years a session musician, this is the first album under his own name. The press copy will tell you it's a comedy album. The press copy is partly right. There are jokes. There is a sustained comic premise — every song borrows a mundane frame (renovation, customer service, an auto-reply) and sings it like a love song or a confession. The contrast between the cheerfulness of the arrangements and the seriousness of what they're actually about is the album's whole engine.

The press copy is also wrong about the comedy being the point. The comedy is the form. The point is grief.

Not catastrophic grief. Soft grief. The kind that accumulates from spring being shorter than you wanted, from the renovation taking longer than you said it would, from people not calling, from the body changing, from time. Every song is a small grief in a major key. Renovation is about a kitchen and a relationship that shared a timeline. Out of Office is about being unable to come back and pretending you will. Group Chat is about a friendship that nobody officially ended and nobody is going to revive. Mileage — the oldest song on the record, originally written about a van — is now about a body that aches in places that didn't ache before.

The songs that are most explicitly comic are the ones doing the heaviest lifting. Doing Great is the one that sticks closest to the bone. The chorus is just I'm doing great, I'm doing great over a list of disasters delivered in the verses. It works on first listen as a single. It works on tenth listen as something else.

A few specific moments worth pointing at:

*The bridge of Renovation. At about two minutes in, the song drops to a half-time and Cosmo says, almost off-mic, I told them I'd be done by spring.* It is the only line in the song that admits anything. The rest of the song goes back to bright pop-house. He makes the admission, then keeps building.

*The end of On Purpose. The song is almost obnoxiously confident — bratty pop, yeah that was the plan, it was always the plan.* In the last verse, the bravado cracks for about four seconds. Then it comes back. This is the kind of thing only a sixty-something musician can pull off. A younger artist would either commit to the bravado or commit to the crack. Cosmo does both, fast.

*The way Group Chat ends.* It just stops. There is no resolution. The song is about a friendship that went silent without ending, and Cosmo lets the song do the same thing. It is a structural joke that is also a structural truth.

A few things the album is not:

It is not a sad-old-man record dressed up in pop-house. The cheer is real. He is not faking. He just contains both.

It is not a triumph-of-the-late-bloomer story. The album is too dry for that. There is no narrative of the artist finally being heard. He does not seem especially concerned about being heard.

It is not anyone's first comedy album. He has timing because he has years. The jokes don't beg.

A couple of things I would change. Soft Launch is the weakest song. The synth-pop frame is fine, but the lyric tries too hard — the haircut metaphor is slightly forced, and the song does not quite earn its chorus. He probably knew. He left it on anyway. Read Receipts could have been thirty seconds shorter. The line about the read-message timestamp pays off, then the song keeps going for another verse looking for a second payoff that does not come.

Otherwise: it is the album he should have made. It is the album he could only make now. It is the kind of debut you get from someone who has been writing songs in apartments and motel rooms his whole life and has waited until he had something to say.

Listen on the kitchen radio first. He told someone else this and I am passing it on. Then again at night with headphones.

The orange cat agrees. The other cat — the one named after a B-side — is reserving judgment.

—A.