What's in a name?
Franz Ferdinand
You Could Have It So Much Better
Nomenclature is always imperative in the music industry, and Franz Ferdinand’s acute awareness of this is evidence of the perpetuation of the eyebrow- raised, tongue-in-cheek attitude that catapulted their début album into the limelight last year. Offering such obvious bait to music critics is a move which is both cynical and calculated, and is testimony to the band’s trump card: that is, their precocious and exuberant over-confidence.
Their second full-length offering positively oozes with self-assurance, providing the listener with a refreshingly candid documentation of the band’s reaction to the success of their first album. Rather than a monotonous literal and superficial representation of experiences gained, You Could Have It So Much Better provides us with an emotional reaction to the head-inthe- clouds-feet-off-the-ground industry circles in which they have found themselves.
Tracks such as Evil and a Heathen and I’m Your Villain bite a metaphorical thumb at pushy insiders leeching off ‘the next big thing’, while the pseudo-boredom of Walk Away trivialises emotional involvement. However, it is perhaps the very subject of the band’s mockery that contributes to a niggling sense of dissatisfaction with their second offering.
Yes, obvious chart-tarts like Do You Want To are likely to be greatly successful, with kitsch electropop weaving its way into the minds and bodies of thousands of pimply Freshers the length and breadth of the country. But one cannot help but feel somewhat empty.
On a superficial level, their followup album does exactly what it says on the tin: it’s retro, fun and doesn’t take itself too seriously, but its refusal to make any kind of departure from their first record hints at a band determined to play it safe and stick with a winning formula.
This formulaic approach to their music means that Franz seem to have lost sight of exactly what it was that made them such likely candidates for saviours of the British indie scene; gone is their sense of spontaneity, exuberance and, dare I say it, fun. In their attempt to perpetuate their too-cool-for-art-school image, they seem washed out and jaded, cracks appearing in their carefully-cultivated frowns.
They have forgotten the great riffs and attitude that made their first work so sensational, and in this quest to get one up on the industry, they run the risk of having paradoxically played right into its hands.
5th Oct 2005