For this week’s episode of The New Sincerest, I use two recent concert events (Kelly Lee Owens and Confidence Man) as anchors to discuss the breadth of modern dance music, especially its ability to be quite cerebral but also incredibly cartoonish.
Over the course of the last weekend of March, I attended two concerts in Chicago. The first, Kelly Lee Owens, a Welsh-born electronic producer, was a prime example of how dance and electronic music have evolved over the last thirty years, a dizzying array of trance, house, R&B, and ambient club tracks filling the Metro venue. Stationed between two different keyboards and soundboards, Owens’ performance was magnetic, turning to the crowd to serenade them during midtempo ballads or getting into a head-banging groove during the most ecstatic cuts. Owens’ work, though certainly indebted to the dance trends of the ‘90s, is also beautifully meditative and patient, each track circling around some sort of spiritual epiphany. As I wrote of her newest album, 2024’s Dreamstate:
“Built on the foundations of techno, acid house, trance, Balearic beat, and ambient, Dreamstate is a record largely defined by a soul-searching exploration of the capabilities of synth riffs, vocal loops, simple lyrical refrains, and ecstasy-chasing progressions to elicit something meditative, almost spiritual about dance music: these songs lock into place and slowly grow from their humble beginnings, maintaining their origin points while adding layer upon layer, shades of color, until a full vision becomes apparent. Because of this approach, Dreamstate requires a bit of patience to click together, a couple of listens to fully immerse oneself in the titular mindset Owens aims for across its ten tracks: on first listen, I found myself wanting for more lyrics or narrative, larger-than-life choruses, yet on repeat spins, Dreamstate becomes indicative of what I can only describe as the epiphanies one has out while clubbing, those blips of truth that bubble to the surface through the movement of the body, through the connection between the head and the heart.”
Kelly Lee Owens’ rapturous and cerebral concert, however, was matched in intensity, if not subtlety, by Confidence Man, the second show I attended. Selling out the Subterranean bar-venue, the space packed from wall-to-wall, Confidence Man managed to turn a fairly small stage into a pop star worthy platform, opening bottles of champagne over the crowd, adorning neon-lined shoulder pads and cone bras that synchronized with their light show, and performing locked-in choreography with tongue-in-cheek flair. Confidence Man’s style of throwback ‘90s music turns away from the IDM Kelly Lee Owens’ favors and instead pulls from the likes of Deee-lite, La Bouche, Kylie Minogue, and Ace of Bass; while there is a certain level of goofiness and irreverence in their music, the band take their craft so seriously that the cartoonish nature of it all comes across as deeply sincere and, in these times, surprisingly subversive in some ways. As I wrote of their newest album, 2024’s 3AM (La La LA):
“When a band is led by vocalists named Janet Planet and Sugar Bones, and backed by a duo of anonymous instrumentalists dressed in black top hats with matching veils, its hard to take anything Confidence Man puts out seriously. This is, however, the key to Confidence Man’s endearing presence in the dance music scene: they’re irreverent, they’re stupid, they’re balls-to-the-wall at all times, but they take their self-admitted ridiculousness incredibly seriously. From the outrageous cover art for 3AM (La La La), complete with Bride of Frankenstein hair and cyberpunk outfits and a radioactive green bunker, to the insanely fun music video for lead single “I Can’t Lose You” (featuring Janet Planet flying above a city, nude, in a helicopter), Confidence Man is a dance group ripped out of a cartoon, a spiritual successor to the likes of ‘90s favorites like Deee-lite and La Bouche, pushing at the boundaries of taste until taste is a monolith smashed to smithereens, a rave hosted on its grave. 3AM (La La La) is the group at their most madcap, a significant leveling up of production and color palette from 2022’s Tilt, but if listeners can get past the bouncer of good taste, what is revealed is an uninhibited dance record so rare this side of Y2K. [Their music] is a night out as dance apocalypse. Nobody is too cool to party, if they check their reservations at the door.”
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