Blasting back with a treat for Franz fans
FRANZ FERDINAND: Always Ascending (Domino) Verdict: Scaling fresh peaks ★★★★✩ MGMT: Little Dark Age (Columbia) Verdict: Concise return ★★★✩✩
FRANZ Ferdinand didn’t just launch their own career when they released their eponymous debut album 14 years ago today. The Glasgow group’s blend of artschool rock and indie-pop also kick-started the last meaningful wave of guitar music. The 12 months that followed saw exhilarating debuts from The killers, Razorlight and Bloc Party. keane joined the party on keyboards and the kaiser Chiefs’ employment album arrived shortly after as a generation of boys in skinny ties and skinnier trousers stormed the charts. The Arctic Monkeys aside, indie-rock has since fallen from grace, with the airwaves now ruled by solo acts and R&B. Like many of their peers, Franz Ferdinand have floundered, their struggles encapsulated by a flawed electronic enterprise in 2009 and a failure to build on their double win at the 2005 Brit Awards.
Always Ascending attempts to make up for lost time. Made in Paris with French dance producer Philippe Zdar, the band’s first album in five years is the work of an outfit who have loosened up considerably. Franz Ferdinand have often sounded stern and unlovable, but they now appear to be having fun.
There are other changes, too. A side-project with veteran pop duo Sparks has broadened their horizons and the departure of guitarist Nick McCarthy, who left last year, has allowed the Scots to add a new guitar player, Dino Bardot, plus a keyboardist, Julian Corrie, whose refreshing synth lines drive much of the music here.
Unlike previous nods to electronica, the band’s latest move towards the dancefloor works well, aided by strong hooks and lyrics with greater nuance.
The title track, inspired by an American airship disaster, opens with dreamy harmonies before disco rhythms take over. A saxophone solo adds texture on Feel The Love Go. Lazy Boy’s electronic funk is far from indolent.
BACKED by bright guitars and eerie electronics, a playful mood emerges on Academy Award — ‘the Academy Award for good times goes to you’ — and Lois Lane, a whimsical, yet sympathetic, account of a night at an over-30s singles bar.
Singer Alex kapranos allows himself some artistic licence here, writing from the perspective of a younger man even though he is 45, but the track’s gentle humour makes it one of the best here.
If kapranos’s lyrics now pack more emotional punch, the well-read allusions of old also remain, with Huck And Jim referencing characters from Mark Twain’s The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn and the title track using cloud types such as
cirrus and cumulus as romantic metaphors. On the evidence of Always Ascending, Franz Ferdinand are ready to rise again.
n AMERICAN duo MGMT are also looking to get their career back on track. The band were an inspired mix of the eccentric and the accessible on 2007’s brilliant Oracular Spectacular, but subsequent albums have been indulgent.
Little Dark Age ushers them out of the wilderness. It was completed after a sabbatical in which keyboardist Ben Goldwasser moved to California, leaving singer and guitarist Andrew Van Wyngarden in the band’s New York home town, but it harks back to the catchy singles the pair made as college boys.
She Works Out Too Much sets the tone with a twinkling keyboard motif reminiscent of Hall & Oates.
An amusing he-said-she-said playlet, it features Californian female singer Alle Norton, aka Cellars, in the role of sneering fitness instructor: ‘The only reason we never worked out was he didn’t work out enough.’
elsewhere, the title track nods to Depeche Mode, while TSLAMP — ‘time spent looking at my phone’ — is a withering look at social media.
This return tails off after a bracing start, but MGMT finish in style on Hand It Over, an exercise in Sgt. Pepper-style psychedelia.
Still eccentric, they have also rediscovered pop.