The very first review of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980) recommended, in so many words, that the author should practice writing short stories before attempting a novel. Twenty eight years later, it went on to win the Booker of Bookers, an accolade reserved for, effectively, the best novel to come out in 50 years. With much worse luck, ‘Tonight: Franz Ferdinand’, which was arguably Franz at the peak of their powers and their masterpiece, found itself at best ignored.
If you’re a Scottish Indie band, you never really expect to smell much of a buck. Instead you merely hope that your album would be sheltered by the critic. Neither happened to the extent that the album deserved and the hasty popcorn reviewer blew the last whistle. Many looked down, initially, on this fantastic synth-rock record as being unfaithful to the low-fi rough-edged ways of Indie that Franz were once champions of. The ones appreciative of it didn’t have the conviction to topple the fussers and a belated acceptance didn’t do any good to their spirits. Where were these people who wanted to hear them do their debut record all over again? Tonight was 42 mins of musical genius. A spot-free, clinically constructed album, where track after track matched up and even pulled to greater extents of quality progressively. Although with Right thoughts.., a fan-pleasing effort, you can’t ignore the couple of backward steps taken when their previous effort was something as spectacular as Tonight. It seems like the right format for this would have been to create an EP of the first five songs or to have waited a while longer to spice up and iron out the rest of the album. Yet many would claim otherwise and here’s why.
The mostly bogus ‘concept album’ as a concept puts on a vibe of self-appraised intellectual capacity on otherwise numbskull rock musicians, like it was rocket science to put out an album on a single theme. People have been doing that for years. And albums that claim allegiance to the term seem to sound phonier than fairness cream adverts. The rarity of the ‘concept album’ that actually sounds unpretentious and substantial often matches up the quality of one that actually works, and in Right thoughts…, accidentally, Franz Ferdinand have hit the sweet spot. The lyrics sheet alone could be read as a collection of poems and where musical low points are saved by lyrical high points and vice versa, thus sustaining overall quality control .And the result is highly memorable for album dynamics: The album conspicuously rolls down the hill with its tunes, and takes off with its poetry with every successive track while unfolding like a displaced bow tie.
The album starts with great promise with the title song being arguably their best effort among the dozen. The track also gives a hint of American funk guitar tones of the 70s throughout the album, seemingly inspired by acts of the order of Chic, Kool and the Gang and the rest. The protagonist here is driven almost to paranoia with right thoughts, right words and right action. ’This time, same as before, love you forever’, says Alex Kapranos, about a severely pedantic and, amusingly, diplomatic individual with rounded thoughts expressing himself in sentences like addresses. The album largely revolves around the ‘skeptic’s search for a manual’ and track after track displays that dark lonely place that he is in. ‘Fresh strawberries’ sees his pessimism blend perfectly in with his argumentative self with lines such as ‘Thieves believe everybody steals’, while ‘stand on the horizon’ and ‘brief encounters’ deal with domestic relationship musings with the latter worsened to a sort of self-help skepticism. Progressively, through the album, the protagonist delves more and more into a hellish spitefulness finishing off with ‘goodbye lovers and friends’, spitting out even in after-life: “Don’t fake your memory, don’t give me virtues that I never had”, and scorning at his surviving lovers and friends.
Kapranos also tugs at the surreal with the catchy ‘Love illumination’ where dreams console and seduce the dreamer into self centeredness and wistful thinking, seasoned by enough aphrodisiacal ‘sweet sweet love’s. ‘Love’ was never love, in any direct sense of the word, in Franz’s dictionary and why should it be here in ‘Right thoughts…’ where the skeptic is expected to take that sarcasm through with a hellburner? Musically it is an easy-on-the-ears, custom Franz track with an instant funk groove and a not-so-common-from-Franz single key arrangement and while they could drop these tracks at will it’s almost necessary to have at least one in an album ‘The universe expanded’, the most lyrically interesting and musically uninteresting track, sees the protagonist playing his life backwards from the present and he ‘doesn’t mind losing you this time around’ and hopes to ‘part as happy strangers’ .This is Kapranos on auto pilot and the science fiction twist to it makes it all the more interesting. Other tracks serve well too. ‘Evil eye’ with a suave backbeat and a provocative slasher film music video has Kapranos vocals suited to horror film ambience: huge hallway reverb and eerie synthesizers and ‘Bullet’, where the bullet is the lover’s jealousy, on another memorable riff that sounds like the Buzzcocks on post punk. At times glitches of funk and 70 psychedelia can be seen with dramatic organ-aided finales as seen in ‘Treason animals’ and ‘Stand on the horizon’.
If there ever was to be a reincarnation of the talking heads, Franz Ferdinand would be it. They’re constantly building bridges between various forms of expression, art and literature, doggedly and you can almost visualize the talking heads actually playing ‘Stand on the horizon’. Nevertheless untimely criticism and bad luck has caused them to desperately switch back to old ways with the obvious guitaristic finish to the album speaking of a half-hearted second coming. Had their previous effort received the appreciation it deserved, ‘Right thoughts…’ would’ve been very different. The Russian Polyvox synthesizer, and the like, that sat on the wheel in ‘Tonight’ have now taken that hackneyed role, which is to fill the spectrum or chime along on these extended finales. And with it they’ve lost the novelty factor to a skill they had displayed in ‘Tonight’ that schooled every other Indie band with lessons on how to churn out coming-of-age rock and roll. Even though there is a sense of producing a comprehensive record, the sum of the parts is much greater than the whole and twenty years later ‘Love illumination’ could be remembered but ‘Tonight: Franz Ferdinand’ would never be forgotten.
