With Confidence self-titled album review

Sydney, Australia’s With Confidence have dropped their self-titled record, a follow-up to 2018’s Love and Loathing and their third overall. Admittedly, I haven’t much of a familiarity with the band up to this point in fact my only exposure to the group prior to this was a Train cover. That being said I had a lot to chew on in anticipation of this release. There were five singles on this thing and at face value five out of ten of your tracks being out before release day feels like a lot but I think With Confidence played the singles game correctly. These were spread out over five months and you aren’t assaulted with a triple serving of tracks you already know until the second half.

I am amazed that the first single, “Big Cat Judgment Day,” has not made me hear about this band all over the place. It is such an infectious and catchy song that does so much with just two and a half minutes. The song opens with vocals and whistling that is used as a tool to build the entire track around itself. There’s so many instrumental callbacks to melodies and the songs instrumental re-intro. There is a scream here, which is done nowhere else on the record but it’s a really impactful split second.

“If we suddenly expire would we get some peace and quiet?”

May seem like painfully obvious word play but it does really catch you in the moment. I could analyze this song to death but I think it’s just the kind of strong single that will be a staple in this band’s career. A tour opener in this album’s runs and a tour closer once a fourth record comes out. I would try to dissect it lyrically but the band has been pretty vocal about trying to make a feel good moment out of the pandemic and was quoted in an interview with Kerrang saying;

“Dealing with isolation and empty streets while we were recording the album, it was the first six weeks of lockdown so we were processing and writing in real-time, knowing that we had no idea what we’re going to do with our lives once we finished the record. I was keeping a pretty keen eye on news around the world to see how the rest of the world was faring with the virus. I kept seeing all these stories and articles about wildlife filling city streets and thriving in habitats that would normally be too dangerous or busy for them. Got me thinking about what would be left if all us humans really did get wiped out by the pandy. Who’d be left? Tigers… probably.”

On the second single, “Cult,” the band started to lose me in terms of rollout. At the time I just felt as though the song was nothing but a chorus and there was very little change-up if at all but now that the entire record is in front of me I’m kind of viewing this as one of the best performances overall on this entire effort. In fact it even makes it stand out amongst a sea of singles that are pretty much all a chorus-verse-interlude formula. The beginning of the song is a raw-stripped down version of a chorus you will hear plenty in a bit, but when it comes in with a shout of the tag-line;

“Stop calling me!”

As well as the explosion of the percussion and a riff so well crafted that it serves as its own interlude later on it just feels too grand to ignore it kind of boggles my mind how I thought it wasn’t strong at the time. Lyrically it tackles themes of codependency with a cleverly woven metaphor of religion. See lines like;

“Can’t you see I’m suffering, can’t you see your smothering me? I’m pouring out my blood, I’m spilling out my guts, oh won’t you take this offering?”

After that moment of doubt however I was immediately turned back around on “Anything” and how could I not? This thing has a repetitious chord progression that is led by lyrics that are so much fun to sing along too even if a little nihilistic. It’s also more in line with what I thought I was getting into having come in from a 90s pop cover. That’s not to say the whole song is so straight forward there is a method used on here where every so often we break the track down in a new and exciting way. The first chorus ends with drowning the guitar track in so much distortion that it almost sounds like the coming of an old circus in the distance. As opposed to a natural interlude or break for a guitar solo the band presents us with this quick look at a stripped down version of the chorus that I believe to be led by a tambourine then goes right back to the regular version of itself.

“Paper” was fourth in the singles but comes in right after “Cult” on the tracklist and it has quite literally the same intro. If neon pop punk was your bag in its heyday this song will be right up your alley with it’s sing-along-able sad boy verses and bouncy guitar chords. While I don’t think there’s much to dissect on this one it is a well crafted, concert-ready pop song that has a lot of things about it that are appealing, just not mind boggling. That pause in delivery on;

“Bullet to my… head!”

Is a good example of what I mean here and it has a pretty well structured big-rock outro to boot.

The fifth and final single, “What You Make It” opens the record on a pretty strong note. Right from turning on the album we get hit with this bold delivery of;

“I’m just a star fading, falling naked, burning through my own frustrations. Whatever, not your savior, I just think life’s what you make it.”

Which, as an introductory point to the whole project is a good reel in. Lyrically the track has this self-deprecation laced with a certain cockiness that is present with a different metaphor in every line of every verse. Comparing yourself to a “motel stay on a weeknight” that has a busted door but a “fine” pool may not sound like a very bold statement but when it’s ended with a manifesto of;

“Never quite what you want but I just don’t care.”

I think it makes it’s statement. Something that didn’t hit me until writing this review is how simplistic the instrumental truly is. The verses are led by just one bass groove and the chorus just takes that little footnote and runs with it, making it sound grander. I also will point out that while I think unveiling your intro track is a risky play this came out only days before the record so even if you did get to it it shouldn’t have spoiled your experience too much.

I’m going to be honest, for as much as I’ve been listening to this record in the lead up to writing this review, I don’t think the non-singles have been registering to me 100%. Not that I haven’t been hearing them or learning their words but I haven’t thought about them critically until the notes-taking spin. The reason I bring this up is because the powerpop label a lot of people put on them was sort of lost on me until “City,” I mean this cut sounds like it could be by The Maine. I’m in no way saying that’s a bad thing, I just can see the bands that influenced this one up until this point. There is a fairly drawing guitar chord repeated throughout here that sounds like it could be reimagined into a piano motif as well as some pause for emphasis on certain parts. (One for a vocal, one for a drum fill.) Lyrically I feel this continues the narrative from the track before but in a way that peels back the armor.

“Every little thing I do, just ain’t enough for you”

Sort of shows a different side to the emotion of “never being what you want” and I think to do that immediately instead of on track one then track six is a pretty powerful play. In a way the song itself feels like “What You Make It” turned inside out; it even mirrors the fact that track one opens with vocals that bring in a guitar chord by queuing out the backing band with vocals.

“Baked” is a moment where I’m starting to see the lack of diversity, I mean God we’re using the pause for drums trick I complimented only one track ago. It’s also the part of the record where I start to see how married to their influences this band truly is. I mean this song sounds like William Beckett of The Academy Is… backed by Green Day. None of this to say I don’t enjoy the song but I think elements like this keep the record a fun listen but not a very dynamic output.

I hate to do even more comparisons between artists but “Know You” sounds like the ballad on an All Time Low record. Again, that is not to call out a bad track. I'm loving the synthpop intro that carries itself through the structure of the whole song as well as a lot of the vocal delivery. There’s a certain way the vocal melody changes at various points that I don’t quite know how to articulate well but see the deliverance of;

“Tell me when you hate it sometimes, when you miss your folks upstate.”

Would it truly be an alternative record in the 2020s if there was not a saxophone solo tacked on somewhere? Unfortunately this one is only okay, I sort of keep forgetting it’s there but it certainly fits the moment. It also just serves as a nice break being a slower ballad-like cut that serves as the outro of side A.

“Atlanta” is a fairly uninspiring acoustic track that I don’t really have much to say about. The entire track is built around one chord progression; some strings come to back it up later on. In some ways it almost feels like the vocal melody and the guitar track should not go together but they do well enough.

“Lose” starts out very lowkey then out of nowhere, with almost a gun-cock sound, the song becomes huge and by the end leaves the band sounding tired and struggling to close it all off. That isn’t me literally saying the song sounds tired, what I mean is compositionally it sounds like they were trying to portray the feeling of just slogging to the finish line and I think it works. Lyrically I think this song really closes the themes that the entire record was trying to convey. In the beginning of it all we had this sleazy cocky guy attitude that has now come falling apart at the seams begging the person at the other end of the sentiment to not let them down.

There’s a lot of talk about pop artists using an 80s styling as a selling point right now but I think something that misses a bit of discussion is that the 90s pop rock sound has been making a comeback within the past couple of years, which makes sense a lot of the kids who grew up with that sound are now in bands themselves. I do enjoy the narrative this record is portraying and the songs are all just relatable pop songs that just about anyone can cling to. That being said, I do this this relies on its formula and to be honest I think the singles were chosen in such a way that the slow build up makes it a bit more enjoyable. All and all, while maybe some parts repeat and it isn’t mind-blowing in it’s composition, I do think With Confidence is a strong powerpop record with songs that just work.