Monday, April 12, 2010

Come On, Lets Get High



Sometimes stuff slips through the cracks. Really good stuff. Stuff thats around you, that people listen to, people love yet kinda stays at the back of your mind. Much is made of the so called blog consensus. That hive mentality that picks out its big albums for the year and so you know whats coming in that top 5 on Pitchfork/GorillavsBear/Stereogum/Pazz and Jop months before theyre published. Last year Merriweather Post Pavillion and Veckitemist dominated so much though other albums quality albums get left in their wake (and that's no shots at those albums, I love them both). At the same time everyones trying to push their own pet projects, making sure the really obscure stuff isn't left to float on by unnoticed, and good on them. That's how we do pick up on whats new fresh and keep music moving forward, by exposing them to new ideas.

Yet in all that sometimes stuff gets ignored, overlooked and cast away to the bottom rungs on the end of year lists, if remembered at all.

I am of course talking about Franz Ferdinand's blistering third album Tonight: Franz Ferdinand.

I can see why it happened. Released in January in the shadow of Animal Collective. The Yeah Yeah Yeah's came through with their excellent It's Blitz and its two huge singles, driving them to dance rock domination. And as a result of the declining sway of Brit-Rock and dance-punk and the rise of lo-fi/glo-fi and a Britain under the spell of the XX (another sweet band), Franz Ferdinand got lost in the shuffle.

And what a shame it is. This album was one that was constantly on blast throughout the year. I used to work at a bottle shop back home where the staff had near total control of the stereo (No Wu-tang was one of the few rules, its not store appropriate apparently). As a result of a busy work schedule, it became the best place that once you got a new album, you could put it on and let it play through, no temptation to start skipping tracks and as such you could really appreciate an album as a whole, from start to finish.

And "Tonight" is one of those albums. It plays (i think i remember reading somewhere that it was intentional) like a night out. Starts slow, seedy, sticky, chasing girls, to the massive climax of the new version of Lucid Dreams, the center piece of the album with its meeaaaaaan electronic section before the final come down of Dream again and the drunken, softly spoken memories of the night before in the reprise closer of Katherine Kiss Me.

And what a journey it is. There is simply not a bad song on this album. Beyond the massive singles like Ulysses and No You Girl's, each track is memorable and catchy in its own way. Each one presented with that white boy dandy swagger and class, with the filthy dubbed out bass and seedy lyrics.

So if anyone is reading this, I emplore you to go back to this album. Seriously, this is still played every time before I go out to party. Its something that should not have been overlooked but this can always be rectified. Do your self a favor and cop it now.

No comments:

Post a Comment