The standard line about having your whole life to write your first album and only six months to write your second seemed especially true in the case of Franz Ferdinand. The Glaswegian band issued its sophomore effort You Could Have It So Much Better some 18 months after its 2004 self-titled debut-- a narrow window considering that first record yielded three top 10 UK singles, a Mercury Prize, and a steady touring itinerary that saw them ascend from clubs to concert halls to the Grammys. But the quick turnaround and life on the road didn't affect the quality of the material so much as the band's performance of it-- sounding brawnier and brasher than on their debut, Franz Ferdinand ripped through the album's 13 songs.
Franz Ferdinand must've therefore been happy to sit out the past three years. In the time since Franz released their last album, their American contemporaries the Killers have already gone Springsteen and then swung back to their synth-pop roots, while next-generation UK upstarts like the Arctic Monkeys have weathered their own cycle of hyperbole, hibernation, and orchestral side projects. During that time, Franz Ferdinand first seemed poised to reemerge as the biggest pop band in the UK-- having initially tapped Girls Aloud guru Brian Higgins (Xenomania) to produce their third album-- or the most commercially suicidal, eventually parting ways with Higgins and indulging in extended studio jams, electronic experiments, and deconstructed, Martin Hannett-like recording techniques (complete with tales of using human bones for percussion).
In his review of You Could Have It So Much Better, Pitchfork's Nitsuh Abebe praised Franz Ferdinand for making albums that played like compilations of discrete but equally great singles, refreshingly bereft of the conceptual heft that marked the band's indie-rock peers at the time. Here the group dial that back from the start: "Ulysses" is less immediately striking than the band's previous headlining singles, as well as more lean and mechanistic. But it ably asserts Tonight's slow-burn methodology: If that "la la la" chorus sounds unremarkable at first, by the third round, it's unstoppable.
Instead, Tonight's patient pacing supports Franz singer Alex Kapranos' claims that these tracks share a nocturnal theme, reinforced by a gradually arced dusk-to-dawn sequence, a wandering spirit, and surprises that spring out of the shadows: "Send Him Away" comes on as a cool snap-along Sly Stone strut before intensifying into an unlikely but effective Afro-psych-funk jam; "Bite Hard" is a piano ballad reborn as a thick-heeled glam-rock gallop; the slo-mo-disco group chant "What You Came For" explodes into roadhouse-metal thrashing. But seeing as many of these arrangements were extracted from improvised jams, the shifts rarely feel forced, sounding more like the inevitable climaxes to Kapranos' seedy, increasingly desperate, club-crawling narratives.
It's only on Tonight's would-be epic "Lucid Dreams" that the album's exploratory approach works against the band's pop instincts. Appearing in a considerably different, elongated eight-minute version than the one that debuted on the band's website last fall, the song is now outfitted with a re-arranged, slowed-down chorus that makes it stumble where it should soar. But if the extended fade out feels overlong and anti-climactic on its own terms, in the context of Tonight it provides an effective, slate-cleaning set-up for the album's two sweetly serene closers: space-age bachelor-pad lullaby "Dream Again" and a solo acoustic-troubador turn from Kapranos on "Katherine Kiss Me".
More so than stoking the band's current commercial prospects, Tonight is an exciting record for what it could potentially spell for Franz Ferdinand's future-- from here, you could just as easily imagine the band further exploring electro-house productions, or stripping their sound down and making a folk record, or delving into tropical laptop-tronic pop. Or, if you just want them to keep re-writing "Take Me Out", well, hey, they can do that too-- see: "No You Girls", a standard-issue but still irresistible disco-floor stomper that imagines Bowie re-recording "Oh You Pretty Things" for Scary Monsters (and which recently assumed its natural habitat in an episode of "Gossip Girl). As the band that provided the exclamation point to the post-punk revival of the early 00s, there was good reason to question Franz Ferdinand's current standing in the pop world, now that that trend is on the wane. However, as it turns out, their return is perfectly timed to remind us that, in a world where UK rock is so uninspired the Brits were forced to make superstars out of Kings of Leon, you really can have it so much better.
