In 2004, Franz Ferdinand came blazing onto the scene, their self-titled debut album grabbed listeners with hooky tunes and catchy lyrics and became a standard in playlists for summer barbeques. Since then, with every subsequent album, Franz Ferdinand seem to have been losing momentum, and their fourth studio album, Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Actions is unfortunately no exception.
The album’s opener, ‘Right Action’, presents the usual Franz style, but it completely failed to grab me. In fact, the first few tracks were pretty bland and kind of just blend into one another. The fourth track, ‘Stand On The Horizon’, finally brought some variation, and boy was it welcome. After the jarring wall of sound that was the album’s opening tracks, it was nice to hear a song that was a bit different and seemed less concerned with sounding messy and alternative and was content to just be a song that was pleasant to listen to. ‘Bullet’ and ‘Brief Encounters’, towards the end of the album, were great as well, presenting a more laidback front while still being catchy and fun. These few tracks were fresh and interesting and I really enjoyed them, but for me, they were the only moments of promise in an otherwise completely underwhelming album.
The band are still delivering the same sounds that were fun and fresh on their first album, and herein lies the problem, as none of these sounds are fresh anymore and the band seems to rely on these elements really heavily, resulting in everything just being slightly off. The use of hooks that have become a staple for the band might have been catchy in 2004, but now they just sound repetitive and kind of irritating, Alex Kapranos’ laidback vocals no longer sound charming, instead they come off as borderline lazy. In fact Kapranos sounds like he’s making a real effort for the majority of this album to be edgy and interesting by deliberately singing slightly off-key while delivering his usual vocal furnishings, which just comes off as completely contrived in my opinion. Either the band are still trying to pin down whatever brought their overwhelming success early on, or they’ve decided to just phone it in.
Even the lyrics on the album are pretty questionable. The clumsy opening lines of ‘Fresh Strawberries’ made my cringe with “We will soon be rotten, we will all be forgotten”, and the repetitive chorus of ‘Love Illumination,’ the album’s second single, “Sweet love illumination, sweet sweet love elevation” started sounding eerily like David Brent’s ‘Free love on the Freelove Freeway’ by about the second chorus.
This all sounds pretty harsh, but the band seems to be going through the motions now, cashing in on their previous success without really trying any more. But what sounds tired to my ears might sound fresh and interesting to others, especially for people who are just discovering the band on this album.
5/10
Reviewer: Louisa Bulley
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rZ9ps5kYHM