Confidence is right. These songs swagger and tumble like the whole band is drunk, but they are too coordinated, too graceful, and too internally consistent to be so soused. With a blind impatience, they speed everything up to make shorthand sense, skipping from one well-timed moment of inspiration to another. They’re a drunk savant, I guess; what sounds like mistakes to you and I are just the accents of Trash Kit’s language. And as a step up from their last record, it’s a big one. Along with sometimes sounding like a conjoined perfect musical brain playing in perfect sync, they feel more confident and direct, putting their strengths to use at every turn. The Raincoats comparisons have become more apparent, but there’s also maybe a kinship with a group like Abe Vigoda or drummer John French and their esoteric sense of rhythm and melody — something that can seem shrugged off and arbitrary, but with a quaint conversational tone to it that feels like a better fit for quick, jumpy thoughts like these, too rare and unsure to end in the typical fashion.
The first three tracks prove a stunning opener, particularly “Big Feeling,” which moves from lumpy afrobeat cycles to a slurry of smashed-up punk riffs without wasting a breath, over coy ironies like “When you’re young/ You’ve got time on your side.” Meanwhile, “Leaves” makes use of the girls’ interwoven vocal harmonies, which hang beautifully over the guitars and hold together some of Confidence’s rockier logic leaps as it ascends to its sugar-rush bridge. The lyrics themselves can feel fairly slapdash, clichés of having one chance (to take) and one heart (to break) abound. But these lines, delivered with nervous energy and crammed into small spaces, are actually functioning for once as clichés ought to: short, quick signals of meaning. Anything more ornate would be lost in the mix.
Often the biggest casualty of impatient rock music is coherence, but even at their most breakneck speeds, Trash Kit remain sturdy. Sometimes the voices track the guitars, and sometimes they stay independent of them, but what’s really captivating is how often they switch back and forth while keeping all the plates spinning. “Cinema” pulls this off particularly well, a waterfall of spiraling drum fills building up tension that is then released in expansive guitar chords and crashing cathartic yelps. Sometimes it feels as if the songs were composed live, spontaneous music written to catch ideas as they escape. It’s a record completely defined by reaction, punk riffs following a tempo of thoughts.
“Cheshire Cat” meshes sung-spoke lines of escapism and anxiety with drums that make you pull a double-take, a summer anthem swimming in nervous energy. “Beach Babe” slurs each bar of its so-familiar-it’s-indistinct melody that it feels perfunctory in a good, impatient way, like the whole band is saying: “Get through this verse. Trust us, it’s worth it.” Each song feels like the sleek silhouette of a few hundred practices, a few hundred happy accidents coaxed right into place — aggressive and brave and guaranteed not to waste any of your time.