CHRIS BELL (Big Star) - Chris Bell I Am The Cosmos Deluxe Edition 2CD FLAC

CHRIS BELL (Big Star) - Chris Bell I Am The Cosmos Deluxe Edition 2CD

(includes scans of front, back and 32 page booklet)

I Am the Cosmos is the only solo album by the American pop-rock musician Chris Bell, eventually released in 1992 by Rykodisc, having been recorded over a period of two to three years during the mid-1970s. Bell had previously been a member of Big Star. In 2009 the album was remastered and re-released in a deluxe two-CD version by Rhino Handmade with alternate versions and additional tracks, and three songs by Bell's pre-Big Star groups, Icewater and Rock City



Chris Bell I Am The Cosmos Deluxe Edition 2CD

Disc One

01 - I Am The Cosmos

02 - Better Save Yourself

03 - Speed of Sound

04 - Get Away

05 - You and Your Sister

06 - I Got Kinda Lost

07 - Look Up

08 - Make a Scene

09 - There Was a Light

10 - I Don't Know

11 - Fight at the Table

12 - Though I Know She Lies



Disc Two

01 - Icewater - Looking Forward

02 - Icewater - Sunshine

03 - Rock City - My Life is Right

04 - I Don't Know (alternate version)

05 - You and Your Sister (alternate version)

06 - I am the Cosmos (extended alternate version)

07 - Speed of Sound (alternate version)

08 - Fight at the Table (alternate mix)

09 - Make a Scene (alternate mix)

10 - Better Save Yourself (alternate mix)

11 - Get Away (alternate version)

12 - You and Your Sister (acoustic version)

13 - Chris Bell with Keith Sykes - Stay with Me

14 - Chris Bell with Nancy Bryan - In My Darkest Hour

15 - Clacton Rag (instrumental)



Chris Bell

I Am the Cosmos [Deluxe Edition]

Rhino; 1992/2009

By Joshua Klein

September 29, 2009



History is written by the winners, but in the case of Big Star it's the losers-- the quiet obsessives, the hopeless romantics "in love with that song" (to quote Paul Westerberg)-- who kept the band's legacy alive under the threat of perpetual obscurity. Certainly Big Star itself (current iteration aside) didn't really last long enough to bask in any belated good will. Alex Chilton's writing partner Chris Bell was gone by the time the band released its second album, 1974's Radio City, and by the next year Chilton had essentially pulled the plug on the group, leaving behind a few loose ends later collected as the once-abandoned, later-resuscitated masterpiece Third/Sister Lovers.



Bell died in a car accident not long after that album's eventual 1978 release. Prone to serious depression and chemical indulgence, he began fitfully working on solo material as soon as he exited Big Star (though he reportedly participated in at least some of the Radio City sessions), and if there was every reason to expect good things from him, Big Star's own bad luck was indication enough he'd have just as much trouble getting people to hear it. In fact, it wasn't until Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers showed up on shelves (however haphazardly) that Bell made his solo bow: the single "I Am the Cosmos" backed with "You and Your Sister", songs coincidentally (or not) steeped in the same sense of sadness and loss that marked Big Star's swan song.



That's all most heard of Bell's solo work until 1992, when Rykodisc compiled his extant studio material on I Am the Cosmos, which fittingly showed up alongside a spiffy definitive reissue of the scattershot Third/Sister Lovers and followed some renewed interest in Bell's writing (This Mortal Coil covered both "I Am the Cosmos" and "You and Your Sister" on 1991's Blood, the latter song sung by then-Breeders Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly). It turned out that Bell, between demo sessions, working in his parents' restaurant, gigging around Europe with various pick-up bands, and dealing with his ongoing depression, had amassed more than enough strong material to make him a cult hero, almost akin to an American analog of Nick Drake, another struggling songwriter lost too soon but unearthed and embraced later (thanks, in no small part, to his own reissues).



Granted, Bell never got his Volkswagen moment, and admittedly he remains on the cultier end of the cult act spectrum. Case in point: while Big Star gets its own four-disc Rhino boxed set, an expanded reissue of Bell's I Am the Cosmos gets relegated to Rhino's Handmade imprint. It's there for people to buy it, but only if they know where to look first. In some ways it's almost fitting that, finally given his moment in the spotlight, he's stationed just left of the bright beam, still illuminated but not totally out of the shadows, either.



But seeing as the original CD issue of I Am the Cosmos was, by necessity, cobbled together from Bell's remains, what, exactly, was left in the vaults? The new reissue features the original album (as such) on the first disc, 12 songs presented in a slightly re-sequenced order. To call most of these songs "down" would be as unjustly reductive as calling Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers "depressing." It may be true on one level, but it fails to get at the soulful essence that makes Bell so special.



Back in Big Star, Chilton and Bell shared a "Chilton/Bell" writing credit, but that was as illusory as "Lennon/McCartney." Away from Big Star, Bell's solo work proves him Chilton's equal, or at least equally inclined toward a sort of melancholy but melodic proto power-pop (the "pop" part echoing the Beatles, of course, but with the emphasis on "power," at least in terms of the emotions it contains and evokes). Here, "Better Save Yourself" hangs heavy and haggard, and Bell's vocals on "Look Up" are downright heartbreaking, giving songs such as it, "Though I Know She Lies" and "There Was a Light" the same sense of shaky, tragic inevitability that pervades Third/Sister Lovers. "Speed of Sound", "Get Away", "I Got Kinda Lost", and "Make a Scene" surely could have found a place in Big Star's oeuvre, too, given their due in the studio.



The second disc is where the barrel scraping begins, but to the set's credit, much of what's included-- 15 tracks, all but two previously unreleased-- actually helps expand the history of Bell and Big Star. Yes, the bulk comprises alternate versions and mixes (including a version of "Get Away" featuring Chilton on guitar), but as with the rarities on Big Star's box, the different perspective proves an invaluable annex to the band's limited catalog (just as fleeting captures of Bell's slow, Southern drawl of a speaking voice proves a fascinating contrast to his sharp, British Invasion-inflected singing voice). Fleshing out the still oddly incomplete Big Star portrait are a few tracks from Bell's pre-Big Star bands Icewater and Rock City (whose early version of "My Life Is Right", essentially the same as Big Star's version, underscores Bell's talents), subsequent collaborations with Memphis scene fixtures Keith Sykes and Nancy Byran, and a sleepy solo instrumental, "Clacton Rag".



"There were cool things all over Chris' tapes," said Ardent Studios engineer Adam Hill recently in the Memphis Flyer, referring to "Clacton Rag". "I found one thing they weren't initially gonna put on the Cosmos reissue, this acoustic guitar demo that theoretically could've been cut anytime, although I think it dates to the mid- or late-70s. No vocals, just pure Chris." Considering that Bell's tragically limited life and output precludes a fuller portrait, this edition of I Am the Cosmos comes closest to capturing "just pure Chris" as we're likely ever going to get.



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