Nothing can stop Confidence Man right now. With debut LP Confident Music For Confident People just released, the Melbourne-based project is blowing up around the world. A string of breakout singles led to a triple j feature album, the announcement of a major Australian headline tour, and high-profile billing on the Groovin the Moo festival lineup.
The quartet’s upcoming overseas itinerary, meanwhile, includes slots on some of the world’s biggest festivals like Primavera Sound, New York’s Governor’s Ball and Bestival and Latitude in the UK.
“It’s crazy; we’re still pinching ourselves,” says co-frontperson Sugar Bones. “We don’t really know what’s happened, but it’s really nice that people are responding to it so well. It was great to be able to get so much out of the first few singles so we could actually set ourselves up to release an album in a good position.”
The more songs we wrote, the more the characters developed and grew into these obnoxious, vain reflections of everyone else in our society.
The album is exactly what you’d expect from a group called Confidence Man – a consistently upbeat affair rooted in rhythmically forthright dance instrumentals, topped by persuasive spoken-sung vocals from Bones and his partner in crime, Janet Planet.
The sound is complemented by the duo’s glamorous, unapologetic visual aesthetic and predilection towards choreographed dance routines. Contrastingly, the group’s other two members – Clarence McGuffie and Reggie Goodchild – are typically seen in full-body black cloaks, injecting some dramatic intrigue into the proceedings. Sure, it’s certainly ambitious, but more than that it’s a whole lot of fun.
“The first few songs we wrote, they were pretty silly. We were just mucking around so there was no real angle we were pursuing – it was just what ended up happening,” says Bones of the stylistic evolution the band have slowly undergone since breaking onto the scene. “And the more songs we wrote, the more the characters developed and grew into these obnoxious, vain reflections of everyone else in our society.”
Confidence Man has been deliberately and carefully built into a garish, larger than life act. The group members’ adopted personalities are brazenly cocksure, physically fit and unstoppably hedonistic. Accordingly, the line between fact and fiction is blurred in the biographical details revealed – one guesses Janet Planet and Sugar Bones aren’t the names written on their tax returns, for example.
“Everyone’s still doing things with other projects and really enjoying it, but I think the refreshing thing [with Confidence Man] was that we weren’t really trying to do anything in particular; it was just whatever felt good,” says Bones. “That made it really freeing and liberating – to not have any restrictions or ideas that we were trying to fit into. That was quite different from all these other bands; being able to create something from scratch that doesn’t have to abide by any rules.”
Confidence Man has already proven their significant commercial appeal as an outfit, but the LP doesn’t hew to the sound of contemporary mainstream pop. It’s also out of sync with much of contemporary indie dance music; it has a kind of distinct, glossy strangeness to it.
[The songs] have that accessible, ear worm foundation that we can just sprinkle all kinds of weirdness over the top of.
“We weren’t setting out to make dance music or rock music or any particular kind of music,” Bones says. “It was just whatever felt the best. I think the freedom to take it any direction and combine all these different influences that we had, and not feel like you need to fit into a genre, that made the end product a weird, different sound. It wasn’t quite commercial, but still seems to work in a commercial way and isn’t really underground, it’s still really poppy and sugary.”
Confident Music For Confident People is a dynamic cocktail of genres with rhythms and grooves taken from house music; detours into acid house and Northern soul; hook-laden moments reminiscent of ’80s act like EMF and Big Audio Dynamite; a subversive nod to Beck and the Beastie Boys; and fun-filled self-assurance akin to early -‘00s electro rockers like Le Tigre and Peaches. And while elements from a range of genres are included, at no point does it lose its accessibility, or its sense of voice.
“At the core of every song is a super repetitive, catchy bass line,” Bones says. “Once we’ve got the rhythm and the beats and the bass line, then we’re free to add all the weirdness on top. It has that accessible, ear worm foundation that we can just sprinkle all kinds of weirdness over the top.
“Everyone’s into a whole range of different styles from all kinds of eras. Often we’ll start a song thinking we want to write a song like this – not completely rip it off, but there’s definitely a direct inspiration from certain songs. And a whole range of them, so I think that’s why you get that patchwork style throughout the album.”
A notable source of inspiration when working on the album was a record from just a few years ago. “There was a real deep Todd Terje phase going on. His album, It’s Album Time, had just come out around when we were starting to write the stuff and the fun, cheeky house stuff was really hitting a note with us. That helped create the low-key, pop-house sound. We’re trying to get him to do a remix, but he’s not getting back to us so we’ll have to wait until we’re more famous.”
Confidence Man play the Metro Theatre on Friday, May 18. Confident Music For Confident People is out now.
