Matt Pryor – Confidence Man

Matt Pryor has had a prolific music career in the underground community. First came his breakout act: The Get Up Kids; a band that personified the emo/indie uprising of the turn of the century. I’m not talking about the jet black,swooping hair, polished emo of today, but the real stuff akin to The Impossibles, Saves The Day and Jawbreaker. He then went on to his first “solo” group, The New Amsterdams, which was essentially him with a backing band. After that he went under another alter-ego, The Terrible Twos and released a kids record originally written for his child. Now Pryor is stepping out of the shadows of a moniker and going for a full fledge solo career and Confidence Man is the starting point of that career.

On the record Pryor seems to have once again found his stride. With The New Amsterdams there was always something missing. Yes, there were some sparkling gems in there, Hover Near Fame and From California still receive countless plays on my ipod; but for the most part the records felt somewhat forced and lacked a flow which made them difficult to play all the way through. Confidence Man sees Pryorpicking up where Hover Near Fame left off and building on it. The songs are still soothing, powerful, emotional and catchy but also have a stronger sense of unity threaded throughout them as Confidence Manis built on songs that work by themselves but sound better combined.

He has taken the route that more and more old punks are taking these days: the route of folk; and at it’s heart, Confidence Man is a folk album. It’s fifteen songs of carefully plucked melodies on an acoustic guitar with Pryor carefully crooning overtop. He has a poppier delivery than the likes of Chuck Ragan and Tom Barry but isn’t as polished or whiny as City & Colour or Bright Eyes either. Throughout the record Pryor continually spices things up with the inclusion of additional instruments to round off the sound. A Totally New Year has a energetic vibe in it, pushed forward by constant clapping and a full band pop-instrumentation. Loralai, the lead single, has the most intricate guitar melody of the record and stands out with layered vocals and feels like a mixture between Clapton‘s Layla and Green Day‘s Good Riddance. On Still, There’s A Light, he brings in a banjo to pluck a few chords while he breaks out an harmonica on the title track.

Each song is bringing with, pardon the pun, confidence. The lyrics are heartfelt love songs that are sincere in their honesty and never hit you over the head with it. Even when he does on the three minute ballad, I Wouldn’t Change A Thing, it’s done with such conviction that you just fall in love with the song anyway. Some lyrics are tinged with sense of quirkiness like “I don’t want you to know/that I don’t want you to go/because you’ve got my only set of keys” and others are a call to arms (“We all have a dark side that is ours and ours alone / crawl out of that dark hole and scream damn / damn it all”) and together they combine for a record that is diverse and relatable.

After more than a decade of fronting different bands, Pryor has moved onto the solo route; and while some will always yearn for the Get Up Kids days of old, they’ll be hard pressed to write off Confidence Man as a good start to what will surely be a good career.