Glasgow’s finest four-pack of vaudevillian dandies claim Tonight, Franz Ferdinand, their third album, is an aural journey through a hedonistic night out painting the town orange. From the hushed beginning of synth-drenched lead single Ulysses to the the softly-strummed outro of closer Katherine Kiss Me, however, it would seem Franz are not the rampant party animals Do You Want To’s video suggested three years ago.
In the hopes of maintaining interest in a band that lost its way with the stadium bluster of its second album, You Could Have It So Much Better, Franz have on one level devolved, and on another evolved their sound. Gone are the twin guitar battles of Alex Kapranos and Nick McCarthy, many songs stripped back to Paul Thompson and Bob Hardy’s now disco-influenced rhythm section. As an evolution, or at least a deviation from before, McCarthy takes up melodic duty on synths as fat as a plate of battered Mars Bars, lending the band a sound variously reminiscent of Blondie, Funkadelic, and (on Lucid Dreams lengthy breakdown) any of the recent crop of French house acts. Much has been made of an apparent Afrobeat influence on the album, though in truth it barely surfaces. Instead Send Him Away sounds like a Celtic classic-rock take on the FF template, and Can’t Stop Feeling has an almost samba-like flourish.
No You Girls is remarkable as a song that feels almost an endless chorus, fitting in perfectly to an album that feels more like the instant gratification of a Jagerbomb than concern about the long-term results. As a group of pop songs it’s hardly faultable, but as a cohesive collection it feels limp, cynical and fudged, and offers the cheap kicks of a gelatinous tray of curry chips staggering home at 4 in the morning – The taste will still be in your mouth when you wake up the next afternoon, but you won’t be quite sure how it got there.
