Franz Ferdinand's disco-fied disc is smartly performed
If Franz Ferdinand happened to be an actual person, he’d have vacant eyes and ice water running through his veins. You’d know he was alive only from the barely discernible twitch near the left eye and the taut, grim determination suggested by the clenched jaw.
Pop
Franz Ferdinand
Tonight: Franz Ferdinand
[Domino/Sony]
Three stars
When he dances, as he’s wont to do come the wee, small, booze-soaked hours, he moves like a depressed mannequin, or a modern urban analogue of Mike Myers’ character on the SNL skit “Sprockets.”
He’s cool, the way Andy Warhol’s soup cans were cool.
As it turns out, Franz Ferdinand is not an actual person, or at least, this particular Franz Ferdinand isn’t. The Glaswegian quartet given to painstakingly updating and reanimating latter-’70s new wave is the FF we’re concerned with here. And if this one is a bit more impassioned than the one imagined above, there still remains the icy, aloof air of the post-modern aesthete about the whole affair.
“Tonight” is Franz Ferdinand’s third effort, and it is easily the band’s most unapologetically disco-fied offering to date. Whereas the self-titled debut and more clearly, the sophomore effort “You Could Have It So Much Better...” suggested that there was a bruised heart beating somewhere beneath the ironic stance, this new record is a shameless binge, a drunken stumble through the garden of (shallow and dimly lit) earthly delights. Which in this case means that Alex Kapranos, Nick McCarthy, Paul Thompson and Bob Hardy have whittled away the fat and come clean about who they are: a band much more concerned with style than substance.
For all of this, “Tonight” is an extremely well-made album, beautifully recorded and consistently smartly performed. It begins with the sugar high of “Ulysses,” an absurdly catchy slab of disco-funk-new wave, and then spends most of the rest of its time trying to recapture that high. Yes, our Franz is a one-trick pony. It’s a good trick, though.
This isn’t really a problem, since almost every tune here is as catchy as its siblings. Most boast a dry, in-your-face production ethic that is startlingly effective, particularly when it is contrasted by some purposefully cinematic, reverb-soaked moments, most of which are employed as the best songs’ middle-eight sections. All of them take unexpected detours as soon as you’ve started taking their white-boy funk grooves for granted and commenced to drifting off into your own thoughts. That’s part of their plasticized charm. The rest is all about the guilty pleasure grooves that fill every available space. You know better than to fall for this stuff. But sometimes, it feels good to give in to it anyway.
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