plorentz's Full Review: Tonight by Franz Ferdinand
In the first couple of minutes of Franz Ferdinand's promisingly/threateningly titled third album Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, you get a palpable sense that you may have just stumbled into the kind of bar on the kind of night where some act of violence - be it emotional, physical, or sexual - and some form of destruction - be it moral, material, or spiritual - is a mathematical certainty. You can almost smell the humidity and the sleaze oozing from the darkened, greasy, smoke-stained walls of some nasty dive in the throbbing bassline of the album's lead single "Ulysses", and there's a monster tabloid scandal brewing in the way lead singer Alex Kapranos urgently and unmusically stage-whispers the song's opening lines. Well, I'm bored. I'm bored. C'mon, let's get high. That single sophomoric exhortation to nocturnal naughtiness, its sense of churning, unquantified possibility, its apparent absence of boundaries or values in restless pursuit of the next unnamed thrill serves not only as the launching pad for the song's nihilistic singalong chorus, but also succinctly conveys the record's molten thematic core.
I find this truth self-evident, that while all men may have been created equal, there's still something just a little bit extra-snazzy about Kapranos, who, in an era where the notion of the wildly charismatic, omnisexually intriguing rock n' roll frontman has become increasingly antiquated and irrelevant - "frontmen" are so last century - has nevertheless managed to create a viable and compelling model of this waning art form in his own image. But on Tonight, Kapranos and his cohorts concern themselves specifically with only the most tawdry aspects of their trade, the very relatable sense of moral waste and urban shell-shock - the radioactive byproduct of too many late nights, too many hotel rooms, too much disposable income, too much information, too much adoration and too much time spent with too little to do - illustrated so effectively with the album's noir-ish cover photography, and even more so with the video for "Ulysses", using little more than some chaotic and not-especially-pretty performance footage, some even less flattering handheld close-ups of the individual band members, and some gran mal slice-and-dice editing.
Tonight is the quintessential "difficult third album", the product of a protracted creative process which found the band scrapping early sessions, switching producers, and engaging in a whole lot of strange and, frankly, desperate-sounding studio experimentation - antique, home-made, Russian analogue synthesizers anyone? - in an effort to perfect what Kapranos has called in interviews (recklessly invoking a stale old Andrew Lloyd Weber musical) "music of the night". The tempos so urgent on the first album, and downright frantic on the second, have been slowed down to something more uniform and groovable, and the band is augmenting its signature stab-wound guitar sound (think of the Kinks by way of Blur) with nifty electronics, which, depending where you happen to be in the record, reference the glammy woosh and croon of Eno-era Roxy Music (Kapranos even sounds a little like Bryan Ferry on "Twilight Omens"), the romantic lust of Duran Duran (“Can’t Stop Feeling”), the perky synth-pop of Erasure (“Live Alone”), or the harsh, retro-industrial geometries of Nitzer Ebb (the utterly extraneous extended instrumental coda of "Lucid Dreams"). “Dream Again” is a delicate crystal formation of synthesized psychedelia, all celestial blips, whirrs, and digitally enhanced echoes; while the band go all incense and peppermints with the bedhopping “Send Him Away”, from the webs of Byrds-y twelve-string guitar to the Farfisa sounding thing that pops up out of nowhere in a mid-song breakdown.
The band still indulge their prodigious gift for immediate, shout-along choruses (“Bite Hard”, “What She Came For”) that sound great in the car (not to mention in iPod commercials - see "No You Girls"), but are probably downright riotous in a club setting. But it’s hard to fight the nagging feeling that the band is running out of ideas, or at least feels insecure about possibly running out of ideas. The frantic song tempos may be gone, but there’s still something unfocused, if not downright panicked, about the sheer number of different sounds the band attempts on this 43 minute album, which coupled with the nearly four year interval between this record and its most recent predecessor, suggests a lack of self-confidence utterly at odds with Kapranos’s gigantic on-stage persona. On the other hand, the lack of focus (and maybe even the underlying sense of insecurity) works convincingly well within the album’s I’m bored, c’mon let’s get high concept.
That ethos of hyperactive decadence is echoed in the album’s endless progression of snazzy sonic stunts, and lyrically, in the way, for instance, Kapranos twists a stock job interview line (“Where do you see yourself in five minutes time?”) to suit the exigencies of a hook-up in “What She Came For”; the way the lewd, elliptical rhymes of “No You Girls” go so far nowhere, so aggressively; and the way those same rhymes are re-purposed for a last shot at hung-over acoustic redemption in the album-closing “Katherine Kiss Me”. In the conceptual sense, the record succeeds almost too thoroughly. Franz Ferdinand do the flailing-boredom-urban-ennui thing so well that Tonight: Franz Ferdinand ends up being, well, sort of boring, and it flails around a lot. For all the tricks it drags out of its bag, it still sounds, remarkably (and disappointingly) like your father's (err- older brother's) Franz Ferdinand. At the same time, for all of its desperation, it's the band's most conceptually cohesive album so far.
- - - - - BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
“Tonight: Franz Ferdinand” by Franz Ferdinand Domino Records Released 1/27/2009
Produced by Dan Carey & Franz Ferdinand 43 min.
SONGS: Ulysses – Turn It On – No You Girls – Send Him Away – Twilight Omens – Bite Hard – What She Came For – Live Alone – Can’t Stop Feeling – Lucid Dreams – Dream Again – Katherine Kiss Me
2009 release, the third album from Glasgow-based modern rockers. Tonight: Franz Ferdinand sees them taking a step back from the Post-Punk revival soun...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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