Album Review: Confidence Man – 3AM (La La La)
3 min read
Electro pop band Confidence Man have released their third studio album, 3AM (La La La) under Chaos/Polydor, promising a continued shift away from Electro pop and more toward a club sound. Getting much of the inspiration from the excitement of London, Janet Planet (aka Grace Stephenson) alluded that the title came from the realisation that during late night sessions or getting wrecked and making music, that 3am was the golden hour for when the best ideas were happening. Let’s see if the confidence in 3am’s productivity is warranted….
We kick off with Who Knows What You’ll Find?, which is three and a half minutes of inoffensive poppy house plucked straight from the 1990’s (think a shallow take on Nalin & Kane’s Beachball), pleasant enough but largely forgettable, and this continues through to first single release I Can’t Lose You, which has more depth to the track instrumentation, but is straight from the PartyRock handbook. Control (a double A-side release) feels like a pop-club mix of an Empire of the Sun track, and second release So What has a keyboard set up directly from a ‘Dance Nation’ trance track. This leads to Breakbeat, which put me right off the album – the lyrics “I’m not going to pop it ‘til I hear a breakbeat”, then dropping from a breakbeat into a classic jungle beat gave me the musical ick – and now I cannot unsee it!
Sicko feels like a rehash of Depeche Mode’s It’s No Good mixed with vocals ripped straight from Beloved’s Sweet Harmony – despite (or maybe because of) the heavy lifting, this is my favourite track on the album. The second half of the double A-side release, Real Move Touch features Sweetie Irie, but his lyrics don’t mesh well with the Crystal Waters Gypsy Woman keyboard vibes that the song has… both individually sound components, that shouldn’t have been mashed up. Far Out takes the skip beat straight from Prodigy’s The Experience, Janet feels like a sped up Vanessa Williams’ The Comfort Zone, whilst So Tru goes full cheese 1990’s UK garage. The tempo continues to penultimate track Wrong Idea, which is a pretty standard handbag house track, and rounding off proceedings we have title track 3am (La La La), which is my second favourite track of the album. A decent club track that feels more original than most of the album.
I’m not a fan of 3AM (La La La) – it almost feels like a MUZAK take on generation-old dance tracks – covers/homages to great tracks from twenty or thirty years ago, but not sounding as good in the Confidence Man re-hash/attempted glow-up, nor any consistency in the style of dance music… it just feels like someone’s thrown some random dance music from the 90’s/00’s into a music repurposing generator, and come up with \the album. Overall, I’m sure it will go down well with gen. alpha, but I remember the originals of these quasi-covers, and I implore gen. alpha to listen to those instead, they’re leagues superior to this… put it this way – I won’t be adding to my 2024 favourites today!
