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Franz Ferdinand – Tonight: Franz Ferdinand

Three albums and four years into a stuttering pop music career, it’s time for Franz Ferdinand to make like the Archduke, and start a world war. Tonight… should explode, or at least threaten to.

But this album isn’t the aural fulmination one would expect. It slouches, smacked-out on a sofa with the other little scrotes who couldn’t finish a sentence, let alone art school. Franz Ferdinand stomp around, if only for a chorus, on most of the tracks on here: they rip off the Specials; they shuffle like the Stones; most likely brown-sounding you into electro-funk oblivion.

That is until ‘Bite Hard’, the least ‘interesting’ but most fulfilling track on the album. The Franz Ferdinand of 2004 return, not tripping over themselves to make sure there’s a rousing chorus and a rousing verse, happy just to bring out a comical synth and produce a modern companion piece to the Benny Hill theme tune. This revelatory passage is short-lived, however, as the very next track, ‘What She Came For’, engages in a souless dance-off with Death From Above 1979. Yawn.

But I like it. Five-stars-like-it (although I can only give it four due to the credit crunch). The best Franz Ferdinand is earnest and personable Franz Ferdinand, and there are just enough moments on the album to satisfy this. ‘Lucid Dreams’ manages to sound almost exactly like any track of their last two efforts and yet somehow retain a modicum of freshness.

But they want to be a dance band, and they do it hard, fast and dirty. Like all great bands, they leave you with the promise of an even greater day, and album closer ‘Katherine Kiss Me’, suggests a time in the future when we will all be conscripted for the next great war of the pop music age – a day when I will be dancing on the rooftops of Glasgow and Franz Ferdinand will be the soundtrack.

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