Fourteen years after exploding into the indie rock world, Always Ascending shows the band taking a cautious step into the current decade.
Some bands possess the uncanny ability to take you back to a certain time of your life at the mere mention of their name. Any discussion of Franz Ferdinand unconsciously asks “where were you in the mid-2000s?” Personally, I fondly remember listening to the band on repeat while working on high school projects, and a Franz Ferdinand t-shirt was the first of many band shirts I would come to own. So tied is the band to this era that a recurring “2000s indie dance party” at venues in Baltimore and Washington, DC is called “Take Me Out,” complete with promotional artwork to match Franz Ferdinand’s 2004 self-titled debut.
Solidifying their tie to the era’s zeitgeist is the band’s actual music, which arrived at the latter end of the early 2000s garage rock revival and injected a new danceable energy into it. What seemed like a minor tweak to a quickly-aging formula proved immensely successful for Franz Ferdinand, as their single “Take Me Out” is arguably one of the most recognizable songs of the decade. The overwhelming popularity of this one song might edge them into one-hit wonder status for some, yet this would be an incomplete picture. Franz Ferdinand quickly followed their debut with You Could Have It So Much Better in 2005 and then Tonight: Franz Ferdinand in 2009, which gave us the popular singles “Do You Want To,” “Ulysses,” and “No You Girls.”
The 2010s have been a tougher time for Franz Ferdinand. Their 2013 album Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action lacked the enthusiasm of its predecessors, and its singles barely made a blip. While FFS, their 2015 collaboration with Sparks, might have been more inventive, its audience seemed confined to only the most devoted cult followers of both bands. This seems to follow a larger trend among garage rock revival bands after the early 2000s: they have more success generating nostalgia than winning any acclaim with their latter-day albums. One couldn’t be blamed for wondering if Franz Ferdinand’s destiny is to advertise throwback indie dance nights and to have its breakthrough single played ad nauseum at sporting events for the foreseeable future.
Yet here we are in 2018, discussing Franz Ferdinand’s fifth album, Always Ascending. Fourteen years after exploding into the indie rock world, Always Ascending shows the band taking a cautious step into the current decade.
Franz Ferdinand’s music has always occupied the intersection of dance music and rock, packing their initial albums with stomps, jangly guitars, and disco hi-hats. While dance-rock bands have slowly fallen by the wayside (the Rapture have disbanded, and LCD Soundsystem and !!! are edging more into electronica), Franz Ferdinand built up their roster to fill this void. When their longtime guitarist Nick McCarthy left the band in 2016, the band added two new members to take his place: Dino Bardot on guitar and Julian Corrie on synthesizer. McCarthy may have occasionally manned a keyboard during his time with the band, but Always Ascending is the first Franz Ferdinand album with a dedicated member to handle electronic instrumentation, and it shows.
Lead single and title track “Always Ascending” opens the album in a manner similar to “Ulysses” on Tonight: Franz Ferdinand. Both tracks are fairly muted in the beginning, before groaning synthesizers indicate the song is about to explode into its main melody. However, “Always Ascending” is far more rooted in house music than its predecessor, with Corrie’s synthesizers and Paul Thompson’s drumming taking center stage. It might be the first Franz Ferdinand track best described as “dance music with rock elements” instead of the other way around.
As an opener, “Always Ascending” gives a bit of a false impression, as the majority of the album isn’t nearly as electronic-oriented. Yet the few moments that are really do steal the show. “Glimpse of Love” is the closest the band have come to straight up synthpop, with a melody not dissimilar to “Enter Sylvia Plath” by fellow Glaswegians Belle and Sebastian. “Feel The Love Go” has more of a typical dance-rock feel with plenty of hi-hat and jangly guitars, and even an extended saxophone-led outro. The synthesizer provides harmony rather than melody this time around, with bass notes that evoke the acid house ending of “Lucid Dreams” from Tonight: Franz Ferdinand – a surprising moment that marked the band’s most notable and greatest foray into electronic music prior to Always Ascending.
The extravagance of these synth heavy tracks has the effect of overshadowing the more traditional rock songs on Always Ascending. Sometimes, this is deserved. On “Lazy Boy” and “Paper Cages” for instance, frontman Alex Kapranos repeats the tracks’ titles what feels like a hundred times, and “Slow Don’t Kill Me Slow” is a forgettable dirge. Other tracks are more attention-grabbing, especially during the album’s mid-section. “Huck and Jim” shows the band toying with a trap hi-hat beat of all things, and Kapranos semi-raps on the bridges in a manner similar to Kasabian’s Tom Meighan. “The Academy Award,” a quieter track about internet addiction and our need for instant gratification, namedrops the Japanese phrase hikikomori, which refers to young adults who withdraw from social life. Coincidentally, its lyrics are very similar to MGMT’s “Tslamp” or “time spent looking at my phone,” a track from their album released the same day. And on track “Lois Lane,” the line “At the over thirty singles night, it’s bleak, it’s bleak, it’s bleak” is sure to intrigue, and apparently refers to a time Kapranos crashed an aforementioned singles night as a young lad. The line is potentially meant for self-deprecation, as all of the band’s members are well into their thirties (Kapranos himself being 45), and Franz Ferdinand may think their search for hit singles is a little bleak amidst a much-changed musical landscape.
Always Ascending is not going to thrust Franz Ferdinand back into music headlines the world over again, and the album most likely appeals to fans who have been following the band for years, if not a decade or more. Still, there is a chance that a new listener hears the album’s title track on the radio, and it becomes their gateway not just to Franz Ferdinand, but the mid-2000s indie rock scene as a whole. On its own though, Always Ascending is a modest but noticeable shift for the band as they begin to tackle new musical trends.
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