Franz Ferdinand – Tonight: Franz Ferdinand (Domino Records)
January 26th, 2009
4.4/6.0
Those of you who feared that Franz Ferdinand were going to take things up to 180bpm and replace their dirty guitars with a lot of pristine, soulless electro blips can breathe out now.
Tonight: Franz Ferdinand does mark a shift in direction but it’s not radical, let alone seismic. The rigid rhythm section and dirty riffs are still there, as are the band’s signature tales of lust and excess, recounted via the unmistakably louche, come-hither vocal delivery of Alex Kapranos.
The band’s third longplayer – which feels like it’s been such a long time in gestation – is musically akin to growing out one’s fringe or carrying around a new handbag. The changes the band have introduced to their sound are just enough to make you realise something’s different.
The subtle changes to the mix are evident on album opener and lead single Ulysses, as well as No You Girls – guitars are dropped lower into the mix, tempos slowed and handclaps added. There’s a flash of days gone by in the jazzy Send Him Away, with a flicker of a guitar solo that’s somehow reminiscent of a similar moment in Darts Of Pleasure.
The bubbling synth intro to Twilight Omens, and the soaring disco chorus of Live Alone offer bigger shifts from the band’s previous sound, but by far the most radical moment is Lucid Dreams.
An underwhelming, shortened, lo-quality snippet of this track emerged towards the end of 2008. Proof that one should never judge a track by its premature leak, this extract omitted the most interesting part of the song. After a radio-friendly three minutes and thirty of pop workout, it slowly metamorphoses to offer a glitchtastic, speaker-shaking climax that owes a great deal to the more avant-garde moments of Hot Chip or The Whip, for example.
A number of people – mainly fans of the band – have commented that Franz Ferdinand’s output take a while to grow on the listener, and this is certainly no exception. Whilst the band’s ‘reboot’ is welcome, it’s a long way from being a memorable album and, in places, lacks the immediacy of tracks from their debut like Darts Of Pleasure or This Fire. However, it’s all still jolly good fun, and the band’s oft-quoted original aim of crafting music that makes girls (and perhaps also boys) dance is firmly fulfilled.
words: Kate Goodacre
Franz Ferdinand play at the O2 Arena in London with The Cure on February 26th. They also tour the UK this March: The Barrowlands, Glasgow (March 4), Academy 1, Manchester (6), Academy, Birmingham (8) and the Hammersmith Apollo, London (9).
www.franzferdinand.co.uk
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Kate Goodacre is a freelance writer, copyeditor and photographer. She founded The Fugitive Motel in late 2006, and her taste in music has been broadened greatly by her co-contributors over the years that the site and the Motel collective has been in business. Kate likes pink lady apples, sunflowers, mixtapes, recycling, open-wheeled motorsport, the smell of a well-kept park, the Today Programme and that strangely invigorating stillness you get in a city early on any weekend morning. 