Score: 8.5/10
Franz Ferdinand’s new album The Human Fear came with this tiny little press release, amazingly stripped-down and non-bombastic by this band’s standards. And, really, that’s what this album is like — it’s a pop-rock run-through, though not a terrible one, a reminder that this stuff is pretty much a museum exhibit at this point but that it’s still way better than The Lumineers and Hozier, if only for having more rhythm and taking itself way less seriously.
Allusion to the erstwhile catalogue combined with shyness of complete emulation is another feather in the cap of The Human Fear. “The Doctor”; for instance, opens with rampant Moog Synth pretty much making a mess all over the place, the result seeming more like a little kid being occupied in the room over by something and not bothering you than any sort of pretense or posturing. “Hooked” is more synth madness, refreshingly robust and virile (compared with mopers like Blur and, um, The Lumineers, that is), most pleasingly, giving Alex Kapranos a platform some amusing, almost sleazy sexual crooning. It’s around this point that you start to wonder if this might be the best Franz album since You Could Have it So Much Better (which wouldn’t be saying much… let’s face it).
And I’ve really noticed this before in pop, but, in this case, as might even act as a sort of ideal or objective, Kapranos’ lyrics seem almost deliberately puerile and foolish. Well, why shouldn’t they be? This stuff is rhythm… it’s intervals… it’s funk, groove, fury, the stuff this band has always been. Do we really want them relating earnestly about their ex-fiancee? Rather, when Kapranos relays on “Hooked” that “Everybody’s got the human fear / It’s ok / You’ve got me hooked”; it plays as a dumb, almost pointless hooking-up groove, built for moving it and making bad decisions to, which is, sometimes, exactly what we need as a species. Hey, nobody would liken it to a “human fear.” That’s for sure.
My game ball goes to drummer Audrey Tait, not the original jug lady in this band, but so correspondent to the original post-punk/disco shtick manifested by old drummer Paul Thompson that nobody would have known there had been a replacement. The only common member to the self-titled debut, excepting gregarious lead singer Alex Kapranos, is bassist Bob Hardy, whose funky, lithe fingerprints, indeed, are all over this album. Franz Ferdinand have belabored in the studio and given us a pop album in The Human Fear proviso of live rock instruments, hence operating within the ideal of The Strokes (something, let’s face it, they’ve always done), and bequeathed a final product that just might get some heads nodding and feet tapping in breweries and concert halls across the globe. I’ll take it.
The “classic album” chatter, then, might commence once you hear that, like “Eleanor Put Your Boots on” did once upon a time, “Tell Me I Should Stay” doubles as the first ballad-like item on the album, and also, arguably, the LP’s finest track. So opposite of Blur’s syrup-y, corny allegiance to “ballad,” the Franz here use it sparingly, and so, to greater effect, with “Tell Me I Should Stay” representing that precious line we typically get in this band’s finest projects, of Kapranos’ rigid exterior of tongue-in-cheek and cheap sexuality being shed, belying a fertile core of genuine emotion and, perhaps, even vulnerability. This will be the part we’ll leave out of the museum exhibit, obviously.
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