On one level, ‘Tonight’ is pure defiance in the face of the recession - Feel good music to dance away the bad news. If that sounds like a flashback to the 1980s, well, it is… in more than one way.
You can look at ‘Tonight’ in two ways. Firstly, it’s simply a well made pop album with catchy melodies and a straight dance beat. Secondly, it’s an uncanny timewarp to the 1980’s in terms of the music and the overall sentiment.
If you’re after some feelgood music, then ‘Tonight’ is so much better than the band’s last album, the unfortunately titled ‘You Could Have It So Much Better… With Franz Ferdinand’ from 2005. The songs on ‘Tonight’ are catchy, the band sounds upbeat and the whole thing has a clear style.
There is no experimenting with different musical directions. Nope, the boys are on a roll and whether it’s a ballad or an uptempo number, the feeling is firmly good times Pop. The band’s basically gone back to their debut ‘Franz Ferdinand’. The main difference is that there are more obviously ‘rock’ styled riffs in the mix.
As indicated by frontman Alex Kapranos recently, the focus is back on making music to dance to. That is, if your idea of a dancefloor is located in a student/alternative/rock disco.
On a more nerdy level, there’s a few other interesting angles to Franz Ferdinand’s new album.
With ‘Tonight’, the band releases an album that invites to dance the night away and escape from the gloom all around us. We have had a banking crisis and rising unemployment for close to a year, yet here is an album full of escapist pop with lyrics by and large focusing on the micro cosmos of the protagonists personal life.
Flashback to 1979/80, a good time for dance-able music that, for a few hours, made you forget what was going on around you. Out of grey, Thatcherite Britain you got the blingy Blitz Kids like Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet rising in technicolour. Over in the Reaganomics ravaged US you had the escapist power pop of The Cars and The Knack. Ok, over-simplified, but enough to illustrate the point.
Where Franz Ferdinand succeed is in creating a bolt hole from reality that I can relate to. This is a welcome breeze at a time when pop music is riddled with too much angst and overtly worn emotions on one side (Coldplay, Elbow) or provided by manufactured artists that have more in common with game characters than with the average music buyer on the other side (Pink, Katy Perry).
Of course, Franz Ferdinand’s music wouldn’t have to be 80’s flavoured to achieve all this. But the band’s continuing fascination with 80’s music is, at least at this stage, incidental. Unlike other 80’s revivalists, Franz Ferdinand’s songs survive largely intact if you strip away the disco bass and wonky keyboards.
On ‘Tonight’, Franz Ferdinand have more in common with the 80’s US power pop scene than with the UK Blitz Kids ranks. Where the Blitz Kids were modernists, their US contemporaries looked back to the 60’s for inspiration. ‘Tonight’ has a definite feel of the 60’s viewed through a pair of 80’s specs, much more so than Franz Ferdinand’s debut album.
Watch Franz Ferdinand Rehearse ‘Ulysses’
The revived Franz Ferdinand are strikingly close to US power poppers The Cars, The Knack and The Last or, going closer to the roots, to Blondie. Any such comparison is not meant to take away from the band’s achievement. ‘Tonight’ is possibly the first conistent Power Pop album to hit the racks since the demise of Brit Pop in the late 90’s.
Listen to the album on Franz Ferdinand’s MySpace page.
We say: 
UK Readers - Buy ‘Tonight’ Here On CD Or Vinyl!
BUY CD BUY VINYL
US Readers - Buy ‘Tonight’ Here On CD Or MP3!
BUY CD BUY MP3
Buy The Limited Collectors’ Edition Box Set Here!
Box set contains six 7″ vinyl singles, CD, DVD and a hardbound book.
