Franz Ferdinand "Tonight" (Domino)
I'm suspicious of rockers in suits; maybe that's why I won't cut the Jonas Brothers any slack. At any other time in the economic cycle, those kids would seem merely precious -- and that's bad enough. But these days, the bespoke Jonases come off as blatantly aspirational, and that's only rock 'n' roll if you're starting with nothing. A Disney push is not nothing.
Economics aside, you could argue that Franz Ferdinand inoculates itself from the "suit-wearing rockers" critique* by embracing the skinny-tie/power-pop thing, not only in countenance but in musical product. That shit was mostly cool, even the Knack. Here's the paradox, though: A lot of those skinny-tie dudes were seriously ugly: The '70s were over, but there was still plenty of coke around, and the coke ate them up. But you don't have to be gay to see that the Franzmen are ridiculously pretty. For the sake of parallelism, let's call it their Disney push.
So I was ready to slam "Tonight," but I can't, because I finally see Alex Kapranos for what he really is: an agent of theater, somewhere down the line from Bowie and Ferry. If he were reared in the U.S.A., he might've turned out to be Adam Levine, who seems un-theatrical, but is actually the most subtle carny-barker in sex-pop history: CHECK OUT THIS AMAZING DICK is his meta-message, over and over again. (I think you need a vagina to hear the actual specific barkin' text.) Kapranos, meanwhile, is more sexually amorphous and needy, because he's British. Check out a tune like "Bite Hard," which owes a lot to Michael Hutchence, who was well-practiced at mixing droopy-eyed vulnerability with agitation (but had Australian hair). Kapranos is a natural.
And maybe INXS is the true reference point for "Tonight," which is firmer and funkier and much better than I would've expected. In the same way that Hutchence and his mates rarely bit off more than they could chew, funk-wise, the Franz guys show similar restraint and/or skill, even when a song veers heavily toward the bottom end ("Ulysses," "No You Girls," "What She Came For"). I can do without some of the melodrama ("Twilight Omens," "Live Alone"), and I'm ambivalent about the 8-minute disco epic ("Lucid Dreams"), but those annoyances are offset by inspired moments such as "Send Him Away," which deftly contrasts some sour-guy lyrics with ska accents. Kapranos might be acting when he sings about envy, but it suits him, and that's kinda the point here.
Previously: Zomby
Many more reviews available here
* For further study: Huey Lewis & The News and the "suit-wearing rocker" critique.
Recent Comments