Tonight: Franz Ferdinand
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What do people want from a review of the new Franz Ferdinand album?
They want to decide if it is worth buying or at least listening to; or, if they have already bought/listened to it, they want to know what it means; or if they already know what it means, they want to be pricked into thinking about it again.
So, is it worth buying?
Yes, but only if you like Franz Ferdinand.
Is it worth downloading illegally?
I am shocked that you would consider breaking the law, but yes it is worth a listen, even for the casual music fan.
Is it better than the last album?
Much better, the last album was a boisterous and vulgar. This one is just boisterous.
What is the best song?
The most immediately groovy is Send Him Away, one of the few songs that really shimmies and gets its message across without shouting.
What is the worst song?
I don’t much like the next song, Live Alone, which makes three minutes feel like ten.
What do you like about it
It is toe-tapping fun, full of analogue synths with their beautifully wonky sounds. Bite Hard — which was my favourite song of theirs at Latitude — is the best example of this.
What do you dislike?
Songs like What She Came For initially sounds funky and smart, but for me it was a bit stylized. The vocals veer between a frail whine and a hyperbolic snarl, neither of which are very engaging. The fact that the song then turns into Helter Skelter is just confusing. Songs like the 8 minute House number Lucid Dreams may have sounded good in the rehearsal room when high, but it is dull on record.
So what does it all mean?
Not very much. The lyrics are all about what goes on when you go clubbing, full of bland universals about ‘you’ and ‘me’, ‘kissing’, ‘feeling’. There is nothing specific or different in the way that Kapranos’s heroes like Mark E. Smith and Sparks wrote about. See, for instance, No You Girls which is full of abstract references girls and boys; there are no concrete images to give it any bite.
How about summing it all up
The problem with Tonight: Franz Ferdinand is that it is enslaved to the dirty electro sound. Dirty Electro evokes an idea of edgy cool, but it also means that the lyrics need to be shouted and tend to deal with scuzzy subjects. Personally, I prefer the dapper cleanliness of The Karelia to the mucky retro of late Franz Ferdinand.