Given their avuncular status in British rock, it’s easy to forget that Franz Ferdinand swept into the previous decade as indie-rock insurgents. Driving their self-titled 2004 debut was a desire to “make records that girls can dance to,” a superficial pronouncement with subtext: Here was a band to reject British indie’s boys-club culture, slyly mock scrappy romantics like the Libertines, and establish a smart, sexy, metropolitan counterpart.
Soon after their arrival, two albums by rising bands refashioned Franz-ian principles to broaden the UK indie-rock scene. Hot Chip’s second LP, The Warning, elevated their funk and disco flourishes by making songs people actually danced to, rather than stiffly thrusting their shoulders; one-upping Franz’s playful homoeroticism, meanwhile, Wild Beasts’ Limbo, Panto crafted an entire aesthetic from fragments of shattered machismo. Outwitted on both fronts—and outsold by Arctic Monkeys—the adopted Scots released a pair of uneventful albums in the next eight years, followed, in 2015, by FFS, a fun if forgettable collaboration with art-pop mavericks Sparks.
For their fifth album, Always Ascending, Franz frontman Alex Kapranos says he wants to “make dance music but play it as a raw band”—a revival of their founding principle, even as they say goodbye to their founding guitarist, Nick McCarthy. But anyone hoping the fresh blood would restore a sense of mischief might be disappointed: The return of synths and disco-ish atmospherics serves, unsurprisingly, to obscure the fact that a nontrivial reinvention still eludes them. But to their credit, Franz Ferdinand are persistently resourceful, and in their theatrical suave and helter-skelter choruses there lingers an obvious knack for starting fires armed only with indie-pop panache.
The best song here is also the most classically Franz in spirit, albeit rendered via sci-fi rockabilly in several undanceable time signatures. After some repetition of a ridiculous hook—”I’m a lazy boy/Yes, a lazy boy/Lazy in the evening boy,” etc.—“Lazy Boy” becomes both a satire and exemplar of pop inanity, syncing with the artificial heartbeat that’s always pulsed through their finest work. “Am I gonna get up-ah?” asks Kapranos’ showboating protagonist, loosely channeling Mark E. Smith. “Never!” he answers, winningly.
The effect dwindles on would-be anthems like “Finally,” which has just enough pizzazz to redeem the serviceable songwriting, while the title track shows what happens when their nerdy ideas overflow, to sometimes joyful effect. “The shepherd misleads so you think you’re transcending,” Kapranos chants, punning on the Shepard tone—a seemingly unending aural illusion—escalating in the song’s background. “It’s never gonna resolve,” he yelps in the chorus, laboring the metaphor a little. But it’s all sleek, catchy, and enjoyably overwrought, the sound of a snappy hype band no longer burdened by relevance.
Some problems arise when they pivot to the current state of things, threatening to veer into an Everything Now moment. There’s the Tinder-skewering “Glimpse of Love,” which whips together a glittery new-wave confection before throwing up a chorus of smug irony: “I need love, so someone better bring me a photographer.” That song’s sibling is “The Academy Award,” a gorgeous and gloomy ballad with the subtlety of Father John Misty writing for late-’60s Scott Walker. Its chorus—“The Academy Award for good times goes to you”—comes off less like social commentary than an unsolicited dad joke, but the chanson mood is dusty and French enough to charm.
In truth, charm might be Franz Ferdinand’s last unblunted asset in 2018. Unwilling to plunge into something more personal, or at least cannibalize their obsolescence for material, the band behind Always Ascending sound unspectacular, their pop sensibilities shorn of the epicurean flair that made them iconic. It’s not that they lack ideas—songs like “Huck and Jim” hint at a band more musically and politically raucous—but while the purpose is there, it all sounds gray and spectral, the mild offerings of a contrarian pop gang who lost interest in showing off.
