Franz Ferdinand

It seems like yesterday, and yet it's been almost twenty years since New Yorkers Strokes and Interpol gave rise to the so-called post-punk revival, also known as new new wave, one of the last rock movements capable of carrying generational weight and drawing in a vast array of bands from both sides of the English-speaking Atlantic (Razorlight, Rapture, Editors, Bloc Party, Arctic Monkeys, Arcade Fire and so on).

Now, setting aside any judgment on the dreadful literary quality of the label coined by a rather lazy critical establishment, what's truly significant is the assessment made of the scene as a whole. According to the most widespread view, the aforementioned bands and the other protagonists of the decade did nothing more than merely rehash the stylistic tropes that had made the fortune of new wave and post-punk. This is not an entirely groundless opinion, but it's undoubtedly a bit too hasty: while it's undeniable on one hand that the sharp, abrasive sound of certain post-punk was reclaimed (alongside an equally evident abandonment of many of the sonic solutions that defined it), on the other hand it's clear to anyone willing to pay attention and break free from convenient, easy judgments that the movement of the early 2000s represented completely different cultural and aesthetic currents. Where classic post-punk and new wave stood as forceful aesthetic responses to the rock of '67 to '75, embodying an arty attitude rooted in American and British academia, the new generation forged its own idea of sound, shaping it instead with the immediacy and energetic drive of indie-rock, effectively coining a kind of Third Millennium rock'n'roll — decadent and danceable.

In essence, faced with a phenomenon of such sociological scope, it would be better not to indulge in the superficiality shown on this occasion by the music-critic intelligentsia, so as to avoid creating distortions and misunderstandings about the cultural contexts underlying it.

Among the pivotal rock bands of the decade, one cannot fail to mention Scotland's Franz Ferdinand, not only for their enormous commercial impact (roughly three and a half million copies sold, not counting digital sales, and over a year spent in the UK top 40), but above all for their ability to rise up as the emblem and paradigm of the entire movement.

Having reached global success in their thirties, after a decade of paying dues, the four-piece made their debut for Domino Records with the single "Darts Of Pleasure", released in September 2003. A late start, perhaps, but a bang of an entrance: in just three minutes, the song essentially sums up the entire Franz Ferdinand universe. The opening four-count on drums, soon joined by jittery bass notes, forms a barely six-second intro; the interplay between the guitars and a vocal delivery caught schizophrenically between new wave hysteria and soul sensuality shapes an anxious verse, meant to be consumed quickly, before giving way to a more restrained, mysterious chorus with the harmonies of a European pop song. There's barely time to take in the full care put into the songwriting (the second chorus doubles in length compared to the first, actually altering its melodic and metric line) before the band sweeps the listener away with a rousing final charge and a German-language chorus somewhere between demented and grotesque (translated: "My name is superfantastic, I drink champagne with salmon, my name is superfantastic").

Taken to the extreme, one could argue that everything on the debut album, the self-titled "Franz Ferdinand" released in February 2004, is condensed into this single song; yet oversimplifying the analysis this way would mean losing a considerable amount of enjoyment, and would fail to capture the many subtleties and variations of a formula that only appears simple and unchanging.

Post-punk encyclopedists will find plenty to sink their teeth into when tracing possible nods to their idols: Talking Heads, Echo and The Bunnymen, Pere Ubu, Pop Group, Devo, Xtc, Wire, Jam, Gang of Four — these and others are folded into a coherent, distilled formula, to which the band shrewdly adds a decadent hedonism typical of acts like Duran Duran or Cars, a melodic sensibility indebted to the Kinks tradition, guitars poised between glam and beat rock, and drum patterns closer to dance music than to indie rock or punk. Not, on closer inspection, the most obvious of combinations.

Digging further into the details, the band's two guitarists, Kapranos and McCarthy, constantly trade rhythm and "lead" lines, sometimes interlocking their riffs in arrangements that are genuinely impressive in terms of rhythmic notation ("40ft"), more often taking turns outlining the instrumental theme and the chordal accompaniment (as in the drunken funk of "Tell Her Tonight" or the call and response of "This Fire").

The sheer ease with which the band masters the song form, building up plenty of tension in pre-chorus sections that often become the pivot from which slogan-like choruses unfurl so naturally, places their music squarely within the rules of Third Millennium pop.

There is, however, a knack for shuffling the deck and altering the blueprint when needed, whether in the arrangements (the sequencer incursions in “Come On Home” or the dreamy keyboards in “Auf Achse”), in the harmonic constructions (“The Dark Of The Matinee”), or in the very structure of the songs. The clearest example is the hugely popular single “Take Me Out”, which opens as a fast, eighth-note post-punk track before gradually slowing its pace into the relentless funk groove that cemented the quartet's international success.

The band's lyrics come across as extremely functional and finely crafted, first and foremost from a phonetic and rhythmic standpoint, and secondly they prove to be effective vehicles for an aesthetic built on youthful turmoil (“This fire is out of control, I'm gonna burn this city”, from “This Fire”), existential ennui (“'Gregor was down again,' he said, 'come on, hit me again,' he said, 'I'm so wasted, I don't care if you kill me'”, from “Jacqueline”), uncontrollable sexual urges (“You can feel my lips undress your eyes”, from “Darts Of Pleasure”), adultery (“Cheating On You”), bisexuality (“Michael, you're the boy with the leather hips, sticky hair, sticky hips, stubble on my sticky lips”*, from “Michael”). On “Auf Achse” it feels like listening to a Jarvis Cocker dazed with sexual desire for an unreachable girl who, deep down, is not so special.

In a British record industry landscape between the Nineties and the Noughties, where a host of talented bands were launched well before they had the human and technical means to withstand the weight of media exposure, the experience of Franz Ferdinand allowed them to burst onto the English-speaking indie scene with calculated, elegant swagger — much like one of the high kicks frontman Alex Kapranos is fond of pulling off while wrangling his Telecaster — and to stay at the top for at least half a decade, cementing themselves as a band of generational cult status.

The completeness and remarkable command of complexity on display in this debut mean that the Scots' career would essentially add little to their dazzling first album and its thirty-nine minutes of restless, virtually non-stop, riotous dandyism (though no one in their right mind should skip the disco and electro mutations found on the underrated "Tonight" from 2009).

* Note the phonetic beauty of the second line, in the original lyrics: “Sticky hair, stickyhips, stubble on my stick lips”

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16/02/2020