Review Summary: Some bands weren't supposed to be remembered, but, try as they might, good music remains good music.
Riding the alt/indie crest into '04 and '05, Franz Ferdinand were never exactly original or exactly respected. Their popularity evaporating with the 'movement' they'd sprung out of, they took a good four years to come out with a third album that barely got two shrugs. Their first one gave teenagers everywhere a few toss-off music videos and the ability to dance while being aloof about it all, all shuck and no jive, the lyrics getting somewhere between shrugging and evaporating before basically settling into a studied insincerity. Considering who was listening, it was enough – certainly enough for some $$$ and another stretch in the studio, which is where things got interesting. I don't know what it is about bands that should have been one-offs getting a second go that makes them sometimes step up to the plate and smack the ball right back over the mound. Maybe it's that nobody really expects anything to come of it, and they're all famous enough at this point to believe they're God, so they might as well start acting like it. Or maybe, if we must be less callous, after all, a musical marketing ploy is still a musical entity of some kind, and given the right place and people more than capable of an actual evolution of style. Then again, it could just be that Franz Ferdinand had built a style around smartly hip hedonism, and it took getting famous for them to party hard enough to get it right. But then again, I'm not even sure if elements of the hedonism aren't in some way fictional: the frontman apparently spent a lot of time offstage writing a column for the Guardian about the food he got to eat on his first world tour, and regularly spends a deal of time in his personal carpentry workshop "making abstract furniture," whatever that means. I do know, however, that this album, more than almost any of the decade past, knows how to push fun almost too far, almost up the back of the throat, knows the difference between thrill-seeking and socialization, and like all great grooves socializes the thrill. If their first effort had a pallid, naive, neurasthenic leanness about it, making its smiling jibes come off more like a poker face, this one had the fulfilled gusto and ease in its boomtown chuckle of a man (or, band) that has known a great sexual satisfaction, and wouldn't mind some more.
While they wouldn't be winning any Good Samaritan awards, there was something oddly comforting in how this time around they seemed to be really enjoying themselves, and putting on the spite, rather than vice versa. But, like most hedonists worth listening to, they had a few things to say beyond ***s and giggles: Listen to how the cocksure groove of "Well That Was Easy"'s ha-you-got-dumped gets hijacked and amplified into serving a genuine pang of frenzied loss that climaxes like breakup sex, ecstatic and mournful. On the two 'sweet' ones, where groove is alternately replaced by a need for her presence ("Eleanor Put Your Boots On") and displaced by a need for her absence, along with his own ("Fade Together"), we watch the lyrics step in to the center and carry some of the musical load, and it turns out they're just thinking and feeling enough to pull it off. In "What You Meant" one thing passing from a woman's lips to a man's ears consternates into a whole mess of confusion over the purest riff on the album, before returning to the basics in defense against such female vexations, affirming at the end that "I feel blood inside the vein, I feel life inside the ligament," for an uneasy, but real, temporary resolve. And yet here, as most everywhere, the songs are about relationships (ie, Sex), whether cold and up-front about the lack of real meaning passing between the interested parties, or whether slick and standoffish in a haze of sharp, clear lyrics that may or may not be about sexual fulfillment not totaling up to personal fulfillment. Everywhere the image, everywhere the caching of Rock staples, the steep reliance on things gone before that cuts them out of any apparent ability to evolve off the plateau of the second album: where they are original, if at all, is in execution. Their lyrics off-handedly walk an edge, here, and their music is that edge, and it cuts a stance in the glass that doesn't look like much of anything we've seen before by doing everything so well they convince us there's nothing else to ask for - when, all told, there isn't that much left to ask for.
Though we should be asking for what is.
What's still there after that question, though, when every limitation and lack is laid bare, is somewhat surprising, actually. It's true that the album probably should have ended two songs before it did, with the last two constituting the second of the sweet ones, "Fade Together," the one that nobly sacrifices too much momentum for too much verbal meaning, and "The Outsiders," an admirable track I can never actually remember a single thing about that's playing the role of the weak one that lets you know what a fluke it was the album managed to be this good at all. But they don't really want to be thinkers, and mercifully, unlike most heathens with nothing to say, the issue of God is simultaneously picked up and dropped by the simple act of calling one's self a heathen. The arty need for poetry only goes far enough to playfully mock the arty need for poetry, along with most other arty needs. That closing track confirms your suspicions that this is ultimately disco, run through a filter of Scottish Britpop, that somehow compromises itself out of the bubblegum, and that somehow is what we should be looking at. Intensity, amplitude, drive; short tracks that somehow end up occupying too much of your time when they get stuck on repeat in your brainpan and on your stereo, always at a higher than comfortable volume; this music is a last-ditch lurch from the gene pool directly descending from The Rolling Stones; this 'pop', in fact, really rocks 'n rolls. And they make much of this, working what almost amounts to a philosophy out of it, what in fact is almost a unique take on this ages old principle, which is where we get somewhat surprised, especially when it's this album that's somehow getting better with time, this album that's coming into focus and reminding what it was to rock in the 00s. Like most things just shy of what has been called, pretentiously and accurately enough, a 'True Greatness', once you come to terms with its limitations it grows on you – but unlike a lot of things, especially albums, that are like that, it will also continue to get better every time you listen to it after that.
It will because there is a level of precision and acuity at work here that goes beyond sheer musical power, though musical power certainly derives from this quality in most any act: that is, the precision and acuity of intelligence. All successful works of art manifest a very real quality of intelligence, but not all of them necessarily project it. There is a great tradition in the arts, and especially popular music, of apparent simple-mindedness, and while 'pop' simplicity is certainly of great interest to this group, there is also a very strong current in them of displaying outwardly the intellectual, social, and human dilemmas which are most often in the Pop world internalized into the music itself: outwardly making smart decisions and sly linkages, not bothering to hide how clever they are. Their frontman is Alex Kapranos, an English man in a Scottish band with a Greek father who somewhat tellingly gets the 'Paul' in his full name "Alex Paul Kapranos Huntley" from a man his mother had a bit of a crush on, a man of no mean popular intelligence – Sir Paul McCartney himself. Possessed, therefore, of no shortage of contradictions in his own life and world, he also has to deal with being what seems to me a very smart fellow, with a certain stylish urbanity to his presence, who is interested primarily in very crass things, or at least doesn't much believe there's anything that isn't on some level crass. Pretentious, yet humbled by his own apparent awareness of this, he has in his voice a narrow but well-honed range, that covers aloof, weary, bouncy, joyous, confused, and – very rarely – enraged; this goes well with his lyrics, in which he has a kind of amiable, wordy volubility that ultimately lies behind the band's ability to put its intelligence in the fore (so, lyrical intelligence that's more Ani Difranco than Madonna), but because you're always straining to hear him over the music itself (as though he weren't that interested in what he had to say, anyway) any possible problems of oppressive self-indulgence get dissolved, and absolved, in a chemistry of blending knacks and charms. Consider, for a moment, what I mean by him making smart decisions, and clever linkages, in what was the album's biggest hit, and musically its least demanding song: "Walk Away," in whose chorus we hear someone coldly, but joyfully, testifying to his love for a woman as she walks away ("I love the sound of you walking away!"), and in whose lines we hear him cop to this coldness outright, and more, with "I'm cold, yes I'm cold, but not as cold as you are," and a snare drum punctuated follow-up chant of "Why don't you walk away!? Why don't you walk away!?" In short, it's a very hooky, very odd, very good little song, all the way through, even unto the ending, when something very curious happens.
The clangor dies down, and Alex's voice is suddenly holding down the fort like the last man under siege, with no hint of hope for any reinforcements, but with a resigned, calm acceptance of this fatal reality: "Stab of stiletto on a silent night," as she really does walk away, this time, and at this he sees something: "Stalin smiles, and Hitler laughs, Churchill claps Mao Zedong on the back." In these last words the narrator happens, quite profoundly, upon a truth which makes the song somewhat transcend its topical nature: by linking the coldness of a man, and a woman, to the coldness of great, and greatly terrible figures, by even linking the coldness of one of his own country's national heroes, Winston Churchill, to the coldness of murdering dictators, he levels the playing field until it becomes apparent that the only difference between them all is scale, and execution – that a coldness which rives two lovers, and a coldness which oppresses, manipulates, starves, and spills the blood of whole populations, are all of a piece – that there is no meaningful difference between his indifference for this woman and the indifference of the mass murderer for the same – and this sobers and wearies him out of all joy, even a callous one.
Which is really quite good. That kind of political, social resonance isn't something we looked for, or expected, but when it's found you almost begin to understand just why exactly the band was named after the man whose assassination began World War I, thus pitching us into a new sort of modernity, the modernity which fostered those cold motha***as. But the album's title song is also up to something quite clever, here, and something quite opposed to, while arising from, that coldness it spies. One of its shortest tracks, and one of its most concentrated, you could almost miss how damn clever it is if you just bopped along like it wants you to, and indeed it does want you to, as one prescription for this coldness it seems to offer is indeed Bopping, but not that sort of bopping which one does with another: "The last message you sent said I looked really down, that I oughtta come over and talk about it. Well I wasn't down – I just wasn't smiling at you, yeah." Beginning again, as it does, with a cold air between a man and a woman, its repetition of the unresolved theme makes its following resolution of the theme feel definitive: "I'm trying to Get Up, but you're pushing me down, so I'll get up on my own, Oh, I'll get up on my own." And when he next broadens his scope to another sort of sociological maxim, managing to get a Jagger-like, No Satisfaction type feel out of it as he hollers "Now there's some grinning goon on my TV screen, telling us all that it's alright because she wears this, and he said that, and if you get some of these it'll all be alright," he then takes it one step further to play the prophet against this mortal foolery, "Well I refuse to be a cynical goon, passing the masses an easy answer, because it won't be alright, oh no, it won't be alright," and the sounds he makes here makes you believe it, desperation and surety in one fat-ass pill to swallow, before belting out the unsuspected, euphoric reality: "Unless you get up. Get up. Get Up."
"Well I'm just a voice in your earpiece, telling you 'No, it's not alright, you know you could have it so much better – if you tried.'" So get up on your own, it says, and true, it's an album one can be caught dancing alone to, and also an album you can bop along with in a diner, like an idiot, and half-believe the song on the radio that's tapping everyone's toe is this one; its beat is flexible, nimble, pervasive (like rats, social rats, lone rats, rats getting through holes half their size), and seems to possess that universal tempo which could be any song's, is every song's, and people walk with it, nod with it, seem to get with it, and look-it! that pigeon just shat with it, the windshield wiper is its very own metronome! and all the talkers seem to be talking, over clear, bright, riffing cacophony, these same words: "I'm evil and a heathen!!" It cheerfully believes disintegration makes a winning philosophy, and propounds this directly, enforcing it, even, when it gets you that bit deafer with its battering, rat-like insistence to enter the too-small holes of the ears, nevermind the cracks flowering outward on the skull, nevermind its own organs bursting against each other like blood-filled balloons; if this is chaos, if this is death, if this is loss, loss of life, love, blood, and control, it says, let's not pretend this is anything new. Which, as a philosophy, isn't anything new to them, of course – that's rock 'n roll. But when, as themselves, in a new sounding way, they ask "Well, what's wrong with a little destruction?" you know they aren't nihilists because they spend so much energy convincing you hooks are holy. And when they say, "It's time that I had another," they aren't drowning anything, though they might be swimming somewhere.
