A Band Moves Away From the Style It Helped Make Mainstream
The New York Times * January 27, 2009
by Melena Ryzik

It was around 3 in the afternoon when Alex Kapranos's hangover began to wear off. Mr. Kapranos, the lead singer of the Scottish rock band Franz Ferdinand, and his bandmate Nick McCarthy, who plays guitar and keyboards, had spent the previous evening in a refined version of debauchery. They went to a concert - by the British group the Last Shadow Puppets - followed by a late-night feast at the Spotted Pig, the West Village gastropub. Mr. McCarthy capped it off with some dancing at a downtown club, staying out until 5 a.m.

Now both were sitting at Momofuku Noodle Bar in the East Village, recovering.

"I'm feeling very, very tender," Mr. Kapranos, 36, said.

"Do you have any tea?" Mr. McCarthy, 34, asked the waitress.

"No hot beverages," she replied. They ordered water.

The odyssey of a night out, from drug-fueled anticipation to dance-floor frenzy to post-hook-up comedown, is also the subject of the band's third album, "Tonight: Franz Ferdinand," released on Tuesday on Domino/Epic Records. On it, the group - which includes Bob Hardy on bass and Paul Thomson on drums - aimed away from the wry, propulsive post-punk that defined its first two records and made its global 2004 hit, "Take Me Out," an unlikely stadium anthem; even the Yankees used it.

Since then the members have found that their aesthetic - from their high-hat beat to their mod wardrobe - has gone mainstream, especially in Britain, Mr. Kapranos said. "You feel like, right, that's become so much a part of musical vocabulary of the contemporary band, it's now a cliché, and you have to leave it," he said.

So no more "angular guitars," Mr. McCarthy said, a description that has stuck to the band as surely as their slim-cut suits. (Or their angular haircuts.)

But though the band added more keyboards, bass ("It's nice to be the lead onstage occasionally, so that I can show off a bit," Mr. Hardy wrote in an e-mail message), unusual instrumentation, echoes of dub and even an acousticy ballad, "Tonight" will sound familiar to Franz fans, with Mr. Kapranos again singing disco songs about girls and hedonistic behavior.

He has a reputation as a foodie: he met Mr. Hardy when they worked at a Glasgow restaurant, and eventually wrote a food column for The Guardian in Britain. (A collection was released in the United States as a well-received book, "Sound Bites: Eating on Tour With Franz Ferdinand," in 2006.)

Over an elaborate lunch - kimchi and other pickled vegetables, East and West Coast oysters, pork and shitake mushroom buns, noodle soups and hamachi with beet purée - he and Mr. McCarthy discussed their attempts to sidestep the clichés of postpunk stardom while still making a record people could dance, and debauch themselves, to.

"It's a mixed blessing when a band gets that much attention early on," said Jason Bentley, the music director of KCRW, the influential radio station in Santa Monica, Calif., and the host of "Morning Becomes Eclectic." In 2004 that program, with Nic Harcourt as the host, first featured Franz Ferdinand in the United States. Less than a year later the band was opening the Grammys with "Take Me Out."

"For a while there, you thought, 'Are these guys going to go down as a one-hit wonder?' " Mr. Bentley said.

Not that they mind having their music back arena-size sporting events. "I always thought it was funny," Mr. Kapranos said, "because we are the least sporty people in the world."

Still, "Tonight" is an attempt to regroup as the small Glasgow band the members started, rather than the stylish name brand one they seemed poised to become after their self-titled debut, which had a narrowly defined look and a taut signature sound and sold more than a million copies in the United States.

Released a year later, their second album, "You Could Have It So Much Better," did just half as well, and didn't have a hit radio song. Having spent nearly every day together for several years, the band took a break after the tour.

During that time Mr. McCarthy, who recently moved to London from Glasgow with his wife, traveled and studied piano. Mr. Kapranos, who splits his time between Glasgow and Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with his girlfriend, the singer Eleanor Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces, produced an album by the British act the Cribs in Vancouver. Mr. Hardy hung out with friends in New York, and Mr. Thomson, who is also married, started a family.

("Without being mean, I'd say Paul was probably the most puerile member of the band, and now he's by far the most mature and responsible," Mr. Kapranos said. "It's quite shocking.") When the band members reconvened in Glasgow in 2007, they would occasionally play shows in basement clubs for 150 people to test out the new songs.

"Glasgow's not a media center," Mr. Kapranos said. "When you're there, when you're hanging about, you feel quite detached from musical movements or fashions or anything like that. You do feel quite alone, in a good way."

The members spent a year and a half recording the new album in an enormous former town hall in Govan, an industrial area of Glasgow. They treated the 19th-century space - rented for about £400 ($560) a month, "half the daily rate of a London recording studio," Mr. Kapranos said - like a musical playhouse, amplifying hand claps in the dome and using the theater for reverb.

"We were quite into this idea of cutting between takes, in the same way you'd cut between locations in a film," Mr. Kapranos said. "So we'd record a song in the cellar, which has a harsh, hard rock 'n' roll kind of sound, and then for the middle eight we would cut to the large hall."

For the vocals, "we would line all the microphone stands up on the end of the stage, and we'd have all the lights out in the middle of the night, and we'd be singing into complete pitch blackness," he said. But it was only when they compiled the tracks that the nighttime theme emerged. "I don't know whether it came from our personal lives," he said, "or the fact that we sealed off all the windows in this building."

The result is a dance record in the DFA mold, Mr. Bentley said, referring to the Brooklyn label that's home to the band LCD Soundsystem. "There's a bit of a sexy swagger to it," he said, "not quite as angular and edgy, I suppose."

The lead track and first single, "Ulysses," named for James Joyce but inspired by the Greek myth ("My dad used to tell me all those stories when I was young," said Mr. Kapranos, who is part Greek), has already begun climbing the Billboard modern rock chart. That has proved the one-hit-wonder concern "wrong enough," Mr. Bentley said. Though "Ulysses" was a hit on KROQ in Los Angeles, he added, "it's a perfect record for us."

Straddling the mainstream and the more aesthetically refined seems a good fit for Franz Ferdinand. During the meal, Mr. McCarthy said he liked the kimchi the best. And it turns out that Mr. Kapranos is less a foodie in the name-dropping sense - he didn't mind admitting that he'd never heard of the four-star restaurant Per Se - than a fan of the eccentric, like Diner in Williamsburg, where the menu is written on each table's paper tablecloth.

Though Mr. Kapranos had a hard time meeting his deadlines, he is considering picking up nonmusical writing again. On tour, "it is very easy to slip into that total vegetative state and not do anything but drink beer and play PlayStation," he said. Isn't that part of the contemporary rock star life?

"It's so boring," Mr. Kapranos said - the wrong kind of hedonism. He spooned up some dessert, concord grape soft-serve ice cream.

"I'm feeling a lot better now," he said.