Review: Franz Ferdinand – ‘Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action’


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Hoorah!

Franz Ferdinand are back. It’s about time too, after all this a band for whom fandom is a manifesto, one where ideals as opposed to genre jumping with a sideline in celebrity status cultivation are still more important than filthy lucre.

Although of course that helps.

We say that partly because it’s true but also as it seems Alex Kapranos and friends are increasingly wary of coming out to play these days. If the recording of their previous album ‘Tonight: Franz Ferdinand‘ had proven a convoluted and awkward process, it seems that this time the flame has been relit, but only after a hefty drink in the last chance saloon.

To explain: Kapranos has recently spoken of a trip he made to Orkney two years ago to meet his band’s non-musician bass player Bob Hardy, one in which he had the objective of calling a halt to proceedings entirely. Happily for us, due to application of a little objectivity and some robust advice from video producer and mutual friend Diane Martell, the end result was a new resolve to get back to the buccaneering spirit which they’d once epitomised, one that persuaded over three and a half million people to buy their eponymous début album.

The end was nigher than we thought though, if the new record’s finale is anything to go by; Kapranos on ‘Goodbye Lovers‘ applying his typically urbane voice over a chorus that runs with no little cynicism: “So goodbye lovers and friends/So sad to leave you/ When they lie and say this is not the end/You can laugh and pretend were still together”. Yikes.

We can, however, say ‘RELAX’. Despite their near death experience, there’s been no urge to pick up a banjo, or add some wobble to the armory of textures we’ve grown up with over the last near decade.

Unlike their two previous albums, the ten songs that make up ‘Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action‘ were written and road tested live well before the band reached the studio, meaning that the recording process was just the recording process, assisted by amongst others Joe Goddard of Hot Chip.



The result is a collection full of those angular swatches of post punk and glam rock, a world that sounds full of impossibly skinny girls and even skinnier boys eyeing each other up in run down coffee shops. ‘Plus Ca change’, we hear you say, but hold on; this time they’ve rediscovered a sense of vitality that makes the thumping garage of ‘Bullet‘ and the archetypal indie disco (which they practically invented) of the title track some of their most fearless work.

If there’s something as crass as a formula at work here, then that familiarity rarely dulls its appeal, especially when Nick McCarthy‘s guitar and Hardy’s bass are so perfectly casual on the romantically inclined pop of ‘Stand On The Horizon‘, or in the painting of a beige suburban Britain as wryly observed on the Pulp-esque wife-swapping tale ‘Brief Encounters‘.

Both are examples of a group who’ve been through the ego sucking emotions of guilt and self doubt and seen the other side; they may not be our property again for long, but for now brains not brawn are back in fashion.

Hoorah indeed.

(Andy Peterson)


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