d
FRANZ FERDINAND
RATING: 3
PLAY THESE: TAKE ME HOME
SKIP THESE: THE DARK OF THE MATINEE, DARTS OF PLEASURE, MICHAEL
So this is it. The debut full-length release from the hyped-up Scottish retro-70's rockers Franz Ferdinand. Wow. I can't believe how much worse this album is than I expected. These guys suck ass. On so many different levels. All kidding aside, this album is not very good. Ok, the band's breakthrough hit 'Take Me Home' is quite catchy, if a little clumsy at the beginning, but everything else sounds very underdeveloped - even downright amateur at times. While the songwriting isn't quite terrible, nearly all of the songs suffer from extremely poor arrangements, many of which shift tempos in all the wrong places and generally sound a little but "off". Pfft.
Essentially, Franz Ferdinand is a knock-off of The Strokes, except that their drummer plays stupid disco beats on every single song, whether the compositional style calls for it or not. The singer - whose name I couldn't be bothered to learn - rarely sings on key, and generally sounds like what you would expect your average gay university student fronting a gay campus band to sound like. Witness 'Michael,' a generic disco flavored rocker in which the lyrics read "this is what I am, I am a man, so some and dance with me Michael.' This is bum bandit territory, folks, in case you didn't notice. Or more accurately "forced gayness," which is designed to in turn infuriate and/or titillate the listener. Regardless of the sexual politics, the tracks are uniformly dull, the production piss-poor, and when combined with the fact that the vocals are excruciatingly sub-par makes Franz Ferdinand just about the worst "hyped" album I've come across in a quite some time. These guys make Keane sound positively butch in comparison. Good name for a band though....even if the Archduke of Austria-Hungary is rolling in his grave as we speak. Or as I type, more accurately.
YOU
COULD HAVE IT SO MUCH BETTER (2005)
RATING: 3
PLAY THESE: NONE
SKIP THESE: where to begin?
Instead of launching into another vindictive indictment of the latest Franz Ferdinand album, I would like everyone who thinks they like the band to look in the mirror and repeat the following mantra: "in ten years time, I will not cringe in embarrassment when I look back on my Franz Ferdinand fixation." Can you do it? Can you honestly look yourself in the eye and repeat these words? Didn't think so.
These guys are nothing but hype. I honestly tried to approach this CD with an open mind, but I could only make it half way through the album before deleting it from my computer. After doing so, I immediately emptied the Recycle Bin, and began the onerous task of reformatting my hard drive in a desperate effort to remove all traces of this sonic rubbish from my computer. OK, OK, I'm just pulling your leg, but I really do think this music is criminally overrated. Do you remember the saying we all learned in school? You know, the one that goes: "what's popular is not always good, and what's good is not always popular." I know that the proverb originally referred to off-limits behavior like sex, drugs, and bitch-slapping nerds like Alex Kapranos at school, but I think it applies to this situation as well . There are literally thousands of garage bands out there that are just as good - or, more accurately, just as bad - as the "immortal" Franz Ferdinand, so why are these amateurs so popular right now? Who knows. Whatever the answer may be, it's a question that won't puzzle music historians in the future, largely because no-one will even remember these guys ten years from now. I, for one, can't wait for the backlash to begin.