Pop eats itself sequentially. The Hives and the Strokes were too young to experience Max’s and CBGBs first time around so they staged their own costume re-enactment. Karen O and co did the same with No Wave. Interpol, The Killers and a whole slew of imitators seized on the rock fragments that exploded outward in the post-punk vortex AD 79-82. At the event horizon of culture, end-of-historians argue, there’s nothing new under the sun, only recombinant variations of pre-existing elements.
In other words, if Franz Ferdinand hadn’t come together of their own accord, Simon Reynolds might have invented them. That eponymous first album was a déjà vu dream of new pop ideologies crossed with indie at its tautest and toughest. The band’s mixed blood (Greco-Teutonic-Scots-English) begat a truly mongrel sound: Postcard pop fops like Josef K and Orange Juice rubbing up against Gang Of Four, Tom Verlaine and early Talking Heads, with a Smiths-onian lyrical sensibility to keep the Eng-Lit sadhus and bedsit saddoes happy.
They also displayed formidable visual suss in the videos: the Lettrist-Situationist International graphics, geometric hair and paper-cutting creases of ‘Take Me Out’; the homoerotic sweat and Berlin rent-boy chic of ‘Michael’, the tea-drinking teetotalitarianist politburo in ‘This Fire’. One got the impression Franz had studied Lipstick Traces and England’s Dreaming every bit as avidly as The Manics.
And now the clincher: a swiftly delivered second album. Speaking to hotpress.com last year, Alex Kapranos responded to the i-tunes challenge by declaring that henceforth, every album track must aspire to single standard. Fighting talk. Like the title of this record, a post-war Orwellian government propaganda poster crossed with a Frank Spencer self-help affirmation mantra, announcing 13 tunes, two of which breach the four minute mark – but only just – the whole thing weighing in at less than three quarters of an hour. This lot understand the beauty of clean lines and economy as much as Kraftwerk, Moroder or Fritz Lang.
They also know that if you can make the girls dance while the boys play air guitar and/or chin-stroke, you’re halfway there. On ‘The Fallen’ and the cool-geek strut of ‘Do You Want To’ Kapranos and Nick McCarthy’s guitars are gleaming and sinewy, snaking Giger-esque betwixt muscular drums and I’ve-got-insider-information vocals. Difficult gear changes are executed without a grind (the 4/4 to syncopation switch of ‘Well That Was Easy’ might have come off as errant tomfoolery in less capable hands). That the piano intro of ‘Eleanor Put Your Boots On’ briefly evokes Blur’s ‘The Universal’ only serves to remind that Franz are a far better band than any of their Britpop predecessors bar Pulp. They’re also far less parochial: while their contemporaries might set the scene in Shepherd’s Bush, Alex moves it to Brooklyn dirt and Coney Island roller-coasters.
So, ‘Walk Away’ is sarky and crestfallen and spun on the wheel of immaculate melody and atmosphere. ‘You’re The Reason I’m Leaving’ is oh-so arch, but co-opts Duane Eddy’s western twang by way of visceral counterpoint. Then there’s the English country garden gnomic ghost of Syd on ‘Fade Together’, a hazy, druggy little love song halfway between loved up bliss and self-immolation. And the closer ‘Outsiders’ indicates a last minute stand-by seat on a departing flight: Carlos Alomar rhythm guitar, Low keyboards and an atmosphere of dislocation that suggests they’ll go thinner, whiter and more duked out on the third album.
We’ll be waiting. You Could Have It So Much Better is no radical body swerve, just the gratifying sound of a band gaining in confidence and prowess.
Illustration: Jon Berkeley