Franz's plan

(Morning Star, Saturday 15 October 2005)

ALBUM: Franz Ferdinand - You Could Have It So Much Better
(Domino)

UNIQUE music is a rarity these days.

Everyone sounds like everyone else, blurring genre barriers and baffling music fans until there's no way to tell who's the rocker-turned-rapper and who's the pop star-turned-chanteuse.

Franz Ferdinand are hardly unique in history - their jagged guitar stabs and skinny ties owe more than a little to the new wave bands of the 1970s - but, in the here and now, they're one in a million.

First single Do You Want To - sounding unfeasibly like Don't Bring Me Down by ELO - recycles the winning formula of Take Me Out, welding two different songs together, but it works to bring listeners with them through an album that's much heavier and certainly more adventurous than their 2004 debut.

The noisy cartoon swagger of This Boy shows that Franz have balls aplenty, while slower tracks such as Eleanor Put Your Boots On are not out of place either. The standout has to be Evil and a Heathen, an unapologetically punchy blast of pure punk.

It seemed as if Franz Ferdinand's trick was to capture the zeitgeist. By adopting an angular Krautrock style when guitar music as a whole was moving in just that direction.

But the more you listen to this, the more it seems that Franz themselves set the template all along - and we are just their slavish style servants.