Franz Ferdinand Can’t Keep A Secret

I’m beginning to think that the motivation behind album leak crackdowns and Web Sheriff interference is more out of a concern for the Big Secret getting out than anything financial. The Big Secret, of course, being the fact that the music they’re putting so much effort into protecting is actually utter fucking rubbish. If the secret gets out, the entire goddamned house of cards falls down, and the record industry just can’t have that.

Franz Ferdinand are confessed music pirates themselves, and even went so far as to encourage fans to download a new song of theirs just a few months back. So imagine the confusion among those same fans when they heard that the band recently hired the infamous Web Sheriff to stop people from downloading their new album when it leaked. However familiar this song and dance may be by now, it all still sounded very suspicious to me; so I downloaded the record, and got to the bottom of the nonsense: Tonight is a half-assed disappointment of an album.

When they first hit back in 2004, Franz Ferdinand’s angular, hyperactive art school dropout pop furthered the illusion that a tangible, worthwhile scene was emerging with the Vampire Weekends and Bloc Partys of the world. For kids looking for a scene to associate with, free of any annoying hang-ups like artistic merit or original concept, they were a dream come true. For the rest of us, they were just another name to ignore on the endless dial of rocky shit-pop; no more, no less. Sure, they look like pretty good guys, and that Take Me Out song was good- but in the same way You Spin Me Round was good. And nobody fucking cares what Pete Burns is doing these days (trust me, you don’t want to know).

For all its attempts to be something more, Tonight is simply refined art-rock bullshit that never quite delivers. “Three albums in, the archdukes of British art-rock are still unrivalled,” says The Fly, whoever the fuck that is. They’re evidently passing themselves off as a reputable little UK music site, but any place with the audacity to call this blazing comet of mediocrity “a dark, dancefloor art-pop neo-classic” isn’t worth the plot of bandwidth they occupy.

The album falls well short of the minimalist masterpiece it clearly wants to be. What they should’ve done to add some spice was included their cover of David Bowie’s Sound & Vision. It feels like you’re listening to the Killers trying to cover Arctic Monkeys through a Bowie filter, but that’s not such a bad thing. Built around an endearing little riff, it’s entirely forgettable, but better than two-thirds of what you’ll find here.

As for the good, it’s all packed up at the front of the bus on Tonight. Ulysses has some hepcat promise, and the “you’re never going home” line hooks me, but there’s no payoff. We’re stuck in a laser beam for three minutes and change. Turn It On sounds alright in a post-punk cool kind of way. The backups in the chorus make it memorable, and the guitar work brings everything up a notch. It’s danceable, it has a rising sound, it’s all good. 

Then there’s No You Girls, which brings me to the question: would someone like to tell me when the fuck disco came back? Cause I missed that memo, and I can’t find my cyanide tablet. Despite myself, I’m mindlessly drawn to the chorus in this one, just like I was with Take Me Out. Fool me once…

“I wrote your name upon the back of my hand,” vocalist Alex Kapranos sings in Twilight Omens, “Then I woke up with it backwards on my face.” While that’s meant to be a cute ditty about crush love or whatever, all it does is remind me of this: 

I doubt I need to point out that that’s not a good thing.

Dream Again is a trip to psychedelic stupidity, worked over with GarageBand basics- and don’t give me that minimalism shit as an excuse. It’s a failed attempt, awkward in the same way that listening to a high school girl read bad poetry is awkward.

Speaking of psychedelic attempts, I’ll just quote my notes directly for Lucid Dreams: “Jesus Christ what the hell is going on? The first half is terrible. Like, fucking baaaad bad.” Yeah, that pretty much covers the first three and a half minutes or so, until the singing stops. Then shit actually does get trippy and interesting for a bit, and the fuzzy groove of the synth wankery and stompy, programmed percussion ends up being the strongest four minutes of the album. 

Send Him Away is useless drivel, and Bite Hard ends up being a passably rockin’ little number, but in the end it’s way too little, too late for a band that’s far behind their own curve.

The acoustic nonsense Katherine Kiss Me is about making out in an alley next to a bar or something. Entirely forgettable until the piano comes in, at which point it becomes a little endearing, but a mere novelty among 45 minutes or so of mediocrity.

Look. Their first album was alright. Their second was a waste of time, and while this one has its moments, it isn’t much of an improvement for a band with an increasingly unjustified level of exposure. That’s the Big Secret, and that’s all you need to know.  

Tonight
January 26
Domino Records

1. Ulysses
2. Turn It On
3. No You Girls
4. Send Him Away
5. Twilight Omens
6. Bite Hard
7. What She Came For
8. Live Alone
9. Can’t Stop Feeling
10. Lucid Dreams
11. Dream Again
12. Katherine Kiss Me