Confident Music For Confident People: CD

So this is a set of songs that take the kind of all-consuming interior monologues that bored, disaffected youth are wrestling with the world-over and places them square in the middle of the dance floor before adding call-and-response choruses for good measure – it’s the best collection of perfect pop music you’ll hear all year, the perfect embodiment of the characters that made it that somehow manages to be both wildly ambitious and deceptively simple at the same time.

From Melbourne by way of Brisbane, Confidence Man are a portable party that’s levelled dance floors and flattened festival crowds as it’s rolled out across the world, they are a machine custom-designed to make you dance and lose your cool.

Upfront there’s a statuesque chap clad only in a pair of nothing-left-to-the-imagination hot pants next to a woman in a custom designed baby-doll dress and shorts combo while behind them lurk two shadowy mute figures on drums and keyboards, each stripped to the waist and veiled secretively in what look like a satanic beekeeper’s hats made of a material so black, the light seems to fall into it.

If Janet Planet, Sugar Bones, Clarence McGuffie and Reggie Goodchild weren’t a band already you’d be snapping at their heels demanding they form one quick-sharp. Fact is, they are, and this is their debut record. Big and brash and bright as hell, like Dee-Lite tooled up and ready for our berserk modern times.

How they formed is a matter of debate. Janet: “These guys (points to Clarence and Reggie, the veiled men) were real saddoes playing by themselves and I needed someone to play music with me. They were obsessed with trying to find someone cool and they saw me dancing in a club and were like, “We want that girl!” I knew if we were going to get anywhere, we needed a hot dude with a six-pack at the front of the stage to even things out because they were so damn ugly themselves.

We were hanging out at the public pool one day and there was this hot pool guy cleaning the pool and dancing to the music in his head. He looked pretty good in hot pants and while his moves weren’t conventional, they had a certain flare. And now, we’re like mum and dad and these two are just our petulant kids.”

'Confident Music for Confident People' sets eleven tales of 21st century ennui to irresistible, irrepressible dance music. The opening lines of 'Try Your Luck' (“I must confess/I’ve been sleeping with your ex/’Cos I heard he was the best/I must confess/I never would have guessed he would get so obsessed… I’m not surprised”) set the tone perfectly for what follows.