Josh Ostrander is the force behind Mondo Cozmo, and It’s PRINCIPLE! is his fourth album under the moniker. Ostrander’s roots lie in Philly, where he started as a singer-songwriter, but the last decade or so of work has pivoted him from fronting indie folk bands (Laguardia, Eastern Conference Champions), to rising LA-based rock-and-roll as Mondo Cozmo.
Compared to his former albums, It’s PRINCIPLE! is arguably Mondo Cozmo’s most complete and vulnerable body of work. Not many artists are fortunate to successfully hit the reset button, yet that’s exactly what It’s PRINCIPLE! is. It’s the result of an artist, who has been through it, taking a big swing and connecting with an album he believes he made for himself. Ostrander’s creative process and approach to the album completely supports this ethos. He started with over 70 songs and song ideas, and worked them down to what you hear on the record. To keep the art in its pure, personal form, he didn’t share demos with anyone who wasn’t directly involved in the project.
I guess I made this record for myself. I mean I didn’t play any demos for anyone who absolutely didn’t need to be involved. And I actually don’t care if anyone likes it. I mean it’s glorious when they do but I think as a defense mechanism I believe I have created this wall to guard the creative spirit. Maybe that’s what Rick Rubin was actually talking about when he said ‘make music for yourself.‘
Ostrander has previously stated “I write what I know, and I write what I love. I’m at my best… when I take every chance I can to tell anybody ‘I love them.’ It’s something I took away from the pandemic as well.” Many of the songs on the album center around themes and emotions regarding death. This content was inspired by Ostrander’s elder rescue dog, Cozmo, who spent lots of time in the studio sessions for the album.
The opening title track grabs you intensely from the first note. The lyrics at the top of the song gives you the impression this is a song (and ultimately, album) of lawlessness and anarchy; “So I’m slashing tires on Main Street America.” What’s shocking, is that such a force of a song almost didn’t even make the cut. Ostrander explains how he nearly deleted the song before his producer told him that it should actually lead off the album. At this point he decided that trusting the opinions of those he respected was just as important as following his own instincts.
“Here I Am” emits attitude and swagger. Going off of Ostrander’s mentality of making music he just likes, for himself, I couldn’t help but hear a strong Patti Smith/PJ Harvey type of influence in this track. It gives that emotional grip right at the end, squeezing the listener in a spacey chokehold before dropping them into a banger of a track to follow – “Wild Horses” (how coincidentally appropriate that a track about Horses follows a Patti Smith sounding song). It has some moments of stadium country-rock but gets away without sounding cheesy or derivative. “Killing Floor” shows a link to what we loved from his previous releases, but with even more of a momentous sound. This story was inspired by Ostrander’s wife:
My wife was the singer of a band called ‘Apocalipstick’ (a brilliant name), which inspired the line ‘She was a singer in a punk band when she came for me’. She lived in the lower east side of Manhattan. I would take the train up from Philly and stay with her in those early days. I didn’t care for the city – it was dirty and intimidating and I’m too polite to engage properly with all of it. There’s a poem in one of my dumb books by David Henderson depicting a funeral procession for a dead playwright. In the second verse he wrote ‘They scatter your ashes all over the lower east side.’ She underlined this passage in red and wrote ‘scatter me on the lower east side.’ So I added in the 2nd verse – ‘I remember when you said scatter me across the streets, on the low east of mansions and time machines.’ This thinking led me to add the ‘everybody dies on the killing floor’ line in the chorus.
“Sundown In The Age Of Fear” creates a whole atmosphere as the longest song on the album. It is more abstract than the others, but it forces you to listen to the story and follow the seedling to fruition. It’s reminiscent of how Radiohead flesh out songs, who were the first comparison I made upon first listen. One of the more sing-songy tracks “July 4” will soon be one that you can’t get out of your head. The final two tracks “Leave A Light On” and “I’ll Be Around” close the album on a sincere note, a positive and loving sendoff.
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