That’s a bold choice of title for any sophomore album, full stop. So never mind that expectations will simmer at a consistently shrill pitch with no assistance whatsoever (give or take an omnipresent marketing campaign), let’s raise them a notch too.
If there’s one thing you can be sure of though it’s that you were never going to have it any shoddier – you could call their rigorous attention to detail and form, their inherent and unblinking quality control, collateral against that scenario. Their debut stands as crafted-iron proof, every tune a stomping tribute to efficiency and flair. But the case for having it almost exactly the same would be a strong one too, formula is after all this band’s slightly slutty bedfellow, it’s where the guarantees are kept. And they’ve deftly used up a handful of those (though they did stop short of putting out another eponymous album with a differently coloured cover, as originally rumoured). In some ways it feels like they fell off the end of their debut and just kept rolling. And in some ways they have, thankfully.
Without that working understanding of pop-calculus Franz Ferdinand would be nothing. To be the same is ergo not to be derided, but they are also right when they promise you better. On top of the skeleton comforts here is an album that is definitely bigger, bolder, certainly brasher. It’s like an opaque film has been peeled back, a zip unlocked, and the full colour allowed to gush out. There was a teasing unveiling on welcome comeback song ‘Do You Want To’, introducing to us 18 seconds of reduced, tinny, familiar sounding verse, before erupting suddenly and purposefully into the ripe disco stomp that boosts the track and ultimately the whole album forward.
The production then is exceptional, but not just because it jabs firmly where they used to shadow box, but because it’s made so much more room for everything. The ideas are stacked plentifully and creatively, almost too much sometimes, like seeing a red-faced kid with his mouth packed full of liquorish allsorts incase somebody took one away before he’d finished. And they’ve loosened their belt buckles a little too, relaxed and spread out.
‘This Boy’ and the brilliantly sinister ‘Evil & A Heathen’ take up the intensity like Kalashnikov-wielding Russian dance troupes, ‘Walk Away’ strips that all back and adds a measure of human touch to the punch, waltzing along like The Auteurs covering The Kinks, while ‘Eleanor Put Your Boots On’ and ‘Fade Together’ glide elegantly through pools of Beatles-inspired harmony, like synchronized swimmers in grainy archive footage. Alex Kapranos stands authoritively astride his creations spitting out concise, effective lines like a talking lyrical dictionary. It is quite the package.
You could argue that by mastering such an exact formula, and bulking it out so successfully, they’d miss out on any valuable peaks above their line of sight. And they might, but by being the reverse they suggest the ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ adage to be quite true.