I Want You To - Take Me Out

Some albums answer important questions. Franz Frediand’s eponymously-titled (a certain lack of imagination there, guys. You could at least have called it “Mind That Serbian”) debut is one of these, answering the question “What if Noel Coward had been in Gang of Four?” (the post-punk group, not the Chinese dissidents. Or the founders of the SDP).

I’ve always been a big fan of concealing darkness behind a jaunty façade, and with the album’s standout track “Take Me Out”, Franz Ferdinand do this perfectly. The band’s stated intention is to “make girls dance”, but lyrics like the following indicate that there’s more to them than that:

So if you're lonely
You know I'm here waiting for you
I'm just a crosshair
I'm just a shot away from you
And if you leave here
You leave me broken, shattered, I lie
I'm just a crosshair
I'm just a shot, then we can die
I know I won't be leaving here with you

Outside this excellent single, though, how does the album stand up? I think it’d be easier to like it if the entire media hadn’t repeatedly told me that it’s a work of genius. It isn’t. What it is is an interesting debut, but one which leaves a certain amount of room for improvement. For a band which prides itself on an art-school aesthetic, a lot of the lyrics aren’t that good, although the ones in the standout tracks (“Take Me Out”, “The Dark Of The Matinee”, “Darts Of Pleasure”) are good enough. I was amused by the fairly MOR homoeroticism of “Michael” – the more cynical part of me thinks this is included to make the lads in the band even more attractive to the aforementioned dancing girls. The music is really the strong point, reminiscent of late 1970s and early 1980s groups like Pere Ubu, Gang of Four, and Wire.

In conclusion then, don’t believe the hype – but if you like the post-punk/New Wave era, or like a few well-written lyrics, then you might well like this album. If the next Franz Fedinand album builds on the strong points of this one, then it could well be the work of genius we were promised.