Of hedonism
and hard work

Franz Ferdinand distinguish themselves
with a debauched narrative and beat-driven,
dub-inflected rock sound on their third
album, Tonight

MARKET LEADERS: Paul Thompson, Nick McCarthy,
Bob Hardy and Alex Kapranos

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

Ever since the insistent Britpop beat of their debut single segued into a guitar-saddled groove that could actually pack a dancefloor, Glasgow’s Franz Ferdinand have kept listeners on their feet, if not on their toes. “Take Me Out,” and the eponymous debut album that followed in 2004, set the standard for the Scottish quartet’s cocky lyrics, flamboyant guitars and rhythmic energy, their songs always rendered with attention to pop melody and rock intensity.

When singer Alex Kapranos, guitarist Nick McCarthy, bassist Bob Hardy and drummer Paul Thomson first emerged, the U.K. pop scene had settled into what has stretched to a decade-long funk, apart from the old guard of the ’90s and the occasional underground marvel. Britpop had long been laid to rest, and the shambolic Libertines were the kids’ guitar band and tabloid bait of the moment. Short on outstanding British talent, the indie-rock radar was full of punk-propelled Swedes reviving early Rolling Stones, baroque Canadians rejigging ’80s indie-pop and college rock and electro-oriented New Yorkers refuelling early ’80s punk/funk.

Distinct from all that, but displaying a similar tendency toward musical mergers and danceability, Franz Ferdinand fit right in, and looked smart doing it. GQ praised their tailors, their record won Brit and NME awards as well as the more respectable Mercury Prize, and the band promptly cranked out another album, You Could Have It So Much Better, in 2005. With more robust rhythms and melodies, more forceful guitars and vocals, it was an amped-up effort based in stronger songcraft than before.

But where to go from there?

WELCOME TO PARADISE

“I think there is a crossover, but it’s Green Day’s crowd, essentially,” says Hardy, two dates into an American tour supporting the ever-teen punk band. Franz Ferdinand haven’t settled for second billing since their very first road trip with Interpol in 2003, and having just come off a headlining tour and a series of 90-minute festival sets in the U.K. and Europe, it’s a change of pace, but a welcome one.

“We play for a half-hour in front of this other crowd and it’s exciting—it’s all about energy, it’s like bam-bam-bam, you just play the hits. These people don’t necessarily know who we are or have any of our records, so you’ve gotta go in there and be, ‘Ta-da! This is us.’ Then, before you know it, it’s over and you’ve got this massive adrenaline rush.”

Green Day, whose last album sold roughly 50 million copies, attract an all-ages audience ranging from mainstream radio listeners to true-blue punks. While they’re 1.5 decades and a half-dozen dull ballads short of such commercial success, Franz Ferdinand’s audience is almost equally varied, drawn to the band’s dalliances with classic pop, rock and new wave. “Down the front, we get a lot of teenage girls, and immediately behind them, a lot of teenage boys jumping around and crowd-surfing and shit,” he says. “The further back you go, we pull in an older crowd as well, so it’s quite a broad cross-section.”

“But,” he adds, getting back to the blank Midwestern faces that had confronted them during the previous nights’ sets, “there’s something about playing in front of a crowd like this that makes you try a little harder. You want to win people over, which is always a good thing.”

COME AND DANCE WITH ME

The band had already seen the beauty of this technique while they were secretly testing new tunes in pubs and workingmen’s clubs in 2007 and 2008. They were fitting venues for a set of songs that would come to form their third LP, Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, a near-concept album about a hedonistic night out, with its highs, lows and relationship woes, set somewhere in the vicinity of a dancefloor.

“Basically, we knew we wanted to make a dance record but it wasn’t initially clear which direction we’d go with it,” says Hardy. The band consulted several potential producers before settling on Dan Carey.

“He fit into the band very well in that he doesn’t go about things the easy way and he’s very open to new ideas,” says Hardy. “He’s all into experimentation and investing time into making unusual sounds.”

One such idea was simulating the Doppler effect—imagine the warped sound of a receding ambulance siren—with guitars, an experiment made possible by the high ceilings of the hall the band recorded in.

“We hung a microphone from this massive 40-foot ceiling and we were just swinging it over an amplifier while we were playing the guitar, and it produced this kind of whooshing effect,” says Hardy.

Recording in a cellar beneath a stage, hanging guitar strings from the ceiling and (allegedly) rattling human bones were other studio tricks that Carey pulled from his sleeve. The producer and remixer’s recent credits include La Roux, Hot Chip, CSS and Lily Allen. Rock is not his specialty, and although Tonight still has bite, and the band’s guitars still bluster, that was the point.

“‘Ulysses’ was the first song we got together as it is in its final form, and that informed the rest of the record and where it was gonna go,” says Hardy, referring to the album’s lead track and first single. “We wanted to make it less guitar-heavy and have a broader range of synthesizers, keys and electronics, which we achieved. It’s really different from the second one, which was very rock, with straightforward guitar production.”

Indeed, there are moments on Tonight, particularly during the 8-minute electronic extravaganza “Lucid Dreams,” that are unlike anything the band has produced before, and the record is refreshing for it. The synths on “Ulysses,” the flutters and fog of “Dream Again,” the unplugged barrenness of “Katherine Kiss Me” and an overall tightening of beats, flexing of grooves and loosening of space within the mix add new layers to the band’s oeuvre, while never undercutting their rock ’n’ roll core.

DUB BE GOOD TO ME

The most influential factor in the alteration of their sound was Carey’s fondness for dub. With the tutelage of genre heavyweight the Mad Professor, and experience working with other prominent practitioners of the Jamaican production style such as Sly and Robbie, Carey adorned the record with dub effects. And with their recently released supplement to Tonight, a collection of eight remixes entitled Blood (“It just sounds like a good title for a record,” Hardy explains), they went even further.

“Whenever we got tired and needed a break [in the studio], Dan would bring up one of our songs on the desk and teach us how to dub mix. It gives your ears a break because it’s such a different way of mixing a record. It was getting to be really good so we thought it’d be a great idea if Dan mixed the record again, almost in its entirety, in a dub style, and put it out. So we did.”

Expanding their sound with the dub technique, and cleverly infusing electronic flair into a tightly wound, danceable rock sound, Franz Ferdinand are following in the footsteps of the Clash, whose latter-day albums feature masterful fusions of the black and white, organic and synthetic, hard and groovy sounds of their day. And with Tonight and Blood, Franz Ferdinand have proven themselves both consistent and versatile, a combination that could be key to a long career.

“I think it gets easier the more you do it, really,” says Hardy, pondering other qualities that increase a band’s longevity. “Obviously playing together becomes easier as everyone gets better, and staying sane on tour becomes easier as you learn the tricks of keeping your own personal space. And alcohol helps, of course. We enjoy the drink as much as the next band.”

AT METROPOLIS ON MONDAY,
AUG. 31, 8 P.M., $35