Tonight

Where are the tunes?? Five years ago Franz Ferdinand’s like-it-or-not landmark debut had them by the post-punk reviving truckload. Eighteen months later its patchy-ish successor, the fait-temptingly titled You Could Have It So Much Better, also managed its fair share amongst the haste. That there’s not a ‘Take Me Out’ three albums in is understandable but nor is there anything as grandstanding as ‘Do You Want To’, as quirky as ‘Darts Of Pleasure’, as direct and simple as ‘Michael’ or as elegant as ‘Eleanor Put Your Boots On’. By general standards, Tonight is a reasonably accomplished album by an accomplished band. By self-comparison however, it’s a three-years-in-the-making sterile, dour and quite uninspiring collection of songs.

Sure, it’s grand but nobody, not least those who know better, makes music for it just to be satisfactory. Lead single and album opener Ulysses may happen to be a synth-snarling, super-smart exception but the languid ‘Send Him Away’, pondering ‘What She Came For’ and truly-forgetful ‘Live Alone’ certainly are not. So too might ‘Twilight Omen’ possess the coolest of snake-charming keyboard intros but directly after it ‘Bite Hard’ is all-too-run-of-the-mill Franz and not in the razor-sharp riff sense earlier touched on in ‘Turn It On’ and ‘No You Girls’. Indeed the latter’s superbly seedy opening line of “kiss me, lick your cigarette and then kiss me” is the only occasion when singer Alex Kapranos commands anywhere near as much presence as previously felt.

Yet regardless of the quality of song, Tonight ultimately lives and dies on its premise. Kapranos introduced the record as “music of the night: to fling yourself around your room to as you psyche yourself up for a night of hedonism, for the dance-floor, flirtation… for losing it and loving losing it… for that lonely hour gently rocking yourself waiting for dawn.” It may escape becoming a fully-blown concept album because the band only noticed the similar themes retrospectively (and also because ‘What She Came For’ is about idiotic journalists), but at the very least this proposes somewhat of a twelve-song journey. However it’s one that derails all too easily, oddly coming most unstuck at the standout moment.

‘Lucid Dreams’ – first heard last summer – receives a more comprehensive reworking than Joan Rivers’ mush ten tracks in to morph from a standard-length glam rock homage into a near eight minute acid-house freakout. It’s finale is great, really great but uncomfortably sticks out, indeed the song’s comparatively uninteresting first few minutes rather mirrors the preceding nine tracks. Stylistically it represents the “losing it and loving losing it” Kapranos spoke of and is immediately followed by the “lonely hour” representing hazily-uneventful ‘Dream Again’ and actually-pretty-sweet Ray Davies-eque ‘Katherine Kiss Me’. Good in theory maybe, but such an instant high-to-low whilst listening in your living room instead of when the house lights have just gone up at 3am stops things stone dead in practice.

And just like someone who’s more comfortable in front of the telly than out chasing tail, you’re unlikely to regularly return to Tonight, just perhaps for the occasional foray into those last three James Murphy inspired minutes of ‘Lucid Dreams’. Then you’ll wish Franz Ferdinand had really gone for it.