The past two years for Demi Lovato have been a rollercoaster ride. After the release of her fourth studio album Demi, Lovato preceded to fulfill another season on the short-lived X Factor USA, embarked on two world tours, endured the deaths of her father and dog Buddy, worked her body to a point where she finally felt 'confident' enough to show it off entirely, and worked her voice into the ground before she built it back up better than ever before. There's no doubt about it: vocally, Confident is Lovato's most demanding, spanning four octaves and distancing herself even more from her peers Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez, and perhaps even Ariana Grande.
Running through (overdone) melismas in Mr. Hughes, stretching her voice up to a four second long G#5(!) in Stone Cold, and even experimenting in the whistle register in Wildfire, Lovato has continued to show herself as a talented vocalist. Her stamina in-studio is remarkable, and her phrasing on ballads like the choir-backed Father is light years beyond anyone in her demographic. That being said, her voice does pick up on an annoying nasally and awkwardly placed vocal quality in the middle register - in addition to an often unorthodox vibrato - and she seems even more driven to resolve to the tonic with each of her final-chorus-ad-libs than ever before, which can become polarizing. With Lovato, less is more at this point, as seen in the spectacular and sexy aforementioned "Wildfire."
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