Franz Ferdinand - Tonight (2009)

I suppose since I'm making a blog, and I love music, I might as well blog about music. Original and scintillating. Anyway, Franz Ferdinand. I first listened to these guys back in...fall of freshmen year of high school, I think. I was visiting a family friend in Austria, and he burned me a few CDs: Franz Ferdinand's self-titled, Bloc Party's Silent Alarm, and Mando Diao's Hurricane Bar. I would listen to these on repeat for longer than was likely healthy, because as a musical noob, I didn't have anything else to listen to. At any rate, Franz quickly became my favorite, and to my delight they followed up their debut with the awkwardly titled You Could Have It So Much Better (YCHISMB) the very next year, a promptness that you rarely find in modern music. But despite Franz being my first love, I quickly forgot about them when I was introduced to the wondrous Beatles, and so the band has largely remained on my backburner for the last four years. But now they have finally dropped back onto the radar, and I eagerly acquired the album at first leak.

Tonight: Franz Ferdinand is probably the band's most sinister album yet, but in ways, it's their most passive. Their debut drew you in with hedonistic cries of It's always better on holiday!, and YCHISMB blew you away with the zany, fuzzed out riff of The Fallen. Tonight, by contrast, slyly eases you in with the groovy yet laid back Ulysses, which also happens to be the first single off the album (not counting the unusual situation surrounding Lucid Dreams, to be discussed later). While singer Alex Kapranos is at first somewhat offputting with his whispered "Come on, let's get high!"s, when the chorus comes in, you know you're listening to Franz when you hear the trademark "La, la la la la, Ulysses!"

Ulysses is a mixture of old, catchy chorus Franz, with new, dark, synthy Franz, and as such, it serves as a delicious opener to the album, despite being hookless compared to its predecessors.

Franz returns to old style for the next two tracks, Turn It On, and No You Girls. Both delightfully catchy and full of hooks and hummable melodies, they are a welcome relief for any listener afraid that Franz would follow in Bloc Party's footsteps and experiment with their sound to the detriment of being listenable. The chorus of No You Girls is remiscent of their stomping debut, and it's great to see that they haven't left their roots behind.

Send Him Away marks another relatively new sound for Franz, featuring a spidery riff and a floaty, lightweight beat. As the previous two tracks reminded the listener of the band's debut, Send Him Away has whiffs of YCHISMB, but stays on track with a quiet "Won't you let me stay tonight?" reminding the listener of Ulysses's opening lines.

Twilight Omens marks the weakest step in the album yet, with a repetitive synth line and a forgettable melody, but Kapranos's wandering vocals keep the song interesting enough to avoid being a dud. The short length of 2:30 doesn't hurt either. Bite Hard, one of the more structurally interesting songs on the album, starts with an almost childish piano ditty, one that recalls Eleanor Put Your Boots On off their second album, but less than a minute in a threatening riff starts, and it turns into another groovy rocker, with possibly the best use of synth yet in the chorus.

The album falters a second time with What She Came For, which features an uninteresting beat and a needlessly complicated bass riff that goes nowhere. Kapranos' vocals are at their worst, and the melody is almost nonexistent. It's a somewhat intriguing stab at a different style but in my eyes it falls well short, being saved from utter mediocrity by a decent chorus (can the band even write a bad chorus?). Live Alone is the synthiest track yet found, and it is a fun song, but ultimately fails to impress itself in the listener's memory. Can't Stop Feeling finds reverb on Kapranos's vocals and a buzzy synthline that is catchy in its simplicity.

Lucid Dreams is easily the most interesting track on the album. The "original" version of the track was released as a single last fall, and was a delightfully catchy by-the-numbers Franz track. The (8 minute!) album version of the song is decidedly different. For one thing, it almost entirely omits the infectious chorus of the original ("There is no nation of you! There is no nation of me!"), and the verses are chopped and copied and pasted almost beyond recognition. Halfway through, things get even stranger when synth becomes more and more prominent, until it basically starts freaking out and doing all sorts of trippy stereo left-right speaker tricks. To be honest, the first time I heard the track, I thought it was a terrible and unprofessional remix of the original. But despite myself, I've grown to really enjoy the track, humming along to the skipping and chopped verses almost as easily as did to the original. I wouldn't want Franz to venture much further into this territory, but this experiment has to be labeled a success.

Dream Again is relatively uninteresting, but it works well as a cool-down track from the mammoth Lucid Dreams. Katherine Kiss Me is an acoustic ballad, and when I first saw the track described in "first listen" reviews, I was terrified of another Fade Together. Fortunately, this song is nowhere near as cringeworthy or stilting, and brings both Eleanor off YCHISMB as well as maybe even Faust Arp off In Rainbows to mind. A cute, understated closer.

Tonight was, to be honest, rather disappointing on first listen. But it is a grower, and Franz Ferdinand manages to tastefully integrate their new musical interests while retaining their dance-pop-rock sensibilities. Of note is the bonus cd, Blood, containing "alternate dub remixes" of the album's tracks, only retitled. If you love the reworked Lucid Dreams, the Blood cd is for you. Feel the Pressure, the evil twin brother of What She Came For, blows away the original, and the Ulysses remix, Feeling Kind of Anxious, is no slouch either. A very interesting look at what Tonight may have been if the band lacked self-descipline and restraint.