Hello Cosmos – Come Out Tonight (Cosmic Glue) – Hello, hello, hello, not quite as predicted and celebrating ten years as a recording project so it says here, don’t ask me, time is flying, life is a passing by and Hello Cosmos have, so we’re told, “burst back into being with a flurry of new activity. Alongside new shows, sessions, and singles, the band release Come Out Tonight, a brand new album”. Their first studio album proper in five long years then. The constantly busy songs of Come Out Tonight are indeed pull together as one whole body of work by those recurrent lines of both urgency and just enough hope in their with their cynical smiles “as the world we live in spirals beyond recognition”. That is a glorious start to Grind Into the Shine, the second track on this new album, that rusty guitar before he starts up with the wordery again and we don’t know what will happen next, the next fifteen minutes, these next fifteen minutes, they’re going to be big ones that are going to shape this game, this album, will it fade or will it explode?
Featuring a long list of collaborators, Come Out Tonight takes influences and flavours, in terms of sentiment or commentary or a combination of both, from all corners of this current global shit show. The studio recording sessions for this new album apparently took place in New York City, Los Angeles, Kampala, Leeds, Stockport and Manchester. Produced by Jamie Lockhert at Greenmount Studios in Leeds – Lockhert has produced all of the Hello Cosmos studio records to date, guess he’s the glue as much as anyone is here what with there being so many collaborations and the fact that this is as much a recording project as a band. An album that arrives as “the first studio album proper in over five years following their acclaimed debut Dream Harder in 2020″.
Of the new album, frontman Ben Robinson says: “A lot of the record is about finding the strength to switch off digital screens and go out and live. It’s becoming more and more normalised to stay in, comatosed by ultra-processed food and algorithms firing shallow dopamine hits, keeping us all hooked on a short wavelength, gradually becoming dumber, hopeless and unhealthy… We all need to wake each other up, get off the cool aid of digital apps, social media and algorithmic scrolling.” – I’ll resist a comment on the irony of the bombardment of press releases leading up to this release on my digital screen, hard to avoid it escape over the last few months; “it is unhealthy, I can’t just sit it out…”
Reappearing with a new look line-up, Manchester-based Hello Cosmos currently feature leader and creative force Ben Robinson (co-founder of Kendal Calling and Bluedot) and his brother Simon (drums) and strings/synth maestro Angela Chan (Placebo/Lanterns on the Lake), performing alongside bassist/percussionist Isaac Dobson (Dobbo) and guitarist Alex Beston of Vacant Weekend, sax/synth whizz Frankie Pigeon (Dilettante/BC Camplight) and harmonica player Oli Brown (of Herelduke, who also notably produced Hello Cosmos’ Golden Dirt mixtape).
They do sound rather current, it would be rather easy to lose Hello Cosmos in all the post punk noise that those algorithms they’re kicking against throw at us these days. They are very wordy, or he is, it is a kind of familiar sound, he does talk the walk though, it is more than just another duck or a half-spoken half-ranted shouty frontman stuck in a headwind, more than just stuck on repeat like some kind of dancing monkey with a begging bowl. Hang on, I think I know this one, heard it on the telly, give me big mac, give me fries to go, pop will always eat itself and who is he to come in here questioning us anyway? Coming in here on hire purchase terms. There’s lots to like about this album, the commitment for a start, the rawness; it isn’t confrontation, it more interaction, anger as an energy. They do have some tasty riffs to hang it all on – let it go, let it go, let it go, ghost that anger, don’t ride it out, throw it in the sea, let’s begin again.
Yes It is that spiky post punk thing again, it is another guy half singing and mostly talking his way over a load of raw musical energy, who are all these people who think they can come in here talking over the music? There has been quite a few of them recently; step away from that vanity street. He does have a point though, Ben Robinson does make his points well, his observations, rather a lot of points to be made, he isn’t preaching, he’s commentating. And there is a lot of colour in that music they make to go with all healthy word soup, it isn’t as obvious as it first appears to be, they take a moment to two to start to stand out from the talking-man-at-the-front-of-band crowd, and there is two sides to every story. Awake and Bake is different, they’re more than just a one trick pony, a lot more actually, that’s probably (part of) why this album works where others of this nature don’t – there something a little more here, a touch of black gloss over it all. And there at the end, Old Friends Know, now that’s an unexpected end to the whole affair, what a fine end to an album that they say is just the beginning of what they’re doing next.
And once again, all the little bits of this album that the internet and Tikbooks and the Instabites, the YouTubes that they keep throwing out, the just the two or three tracks you can hear on Bandcamp and here’s a bit of one track and here’s another bit of a bite and some more wording up and we’ll give it you in bits and drips and never mind the attention span, all the drip drip really does Hello Cosmos and this album no favours. Once again you really really need to listen to it all in one go, treat it like the album it is. as the one body of work it is to really get hold of it all properly, you need to listen to the whole thing in once go and not the irony of the bites of it served up as ultra-processed food and algorithms firing shallow dopamine bites between Spotify adverts. Don’t be fooled by the bites of it, give the whole thing a go, it is worth it, it is a good one, they do have their fingers on something in their spiky wordy post punk way….
And here’s another bite when really you need the whole thing and not just the two tracks on bandcamp or bits on YouTube but then it is like paddling like a duck in a headwind and…
THE ORGAN 