They were still on top but a change was coming in the shape of MGMT. It’s a strong follow-up that has aged even worse than their first with clear signs of fatigue all over the songwriting. Their second album You Could Have It So Much couldn’t capture the same level of excitement that their debut did, either musically or culturally, but it also boasted great singles and charted higher than Franz Ferdinand did in both the UK and the US. It’s a glorious testament to the nervous, jittery, riff-based triumphs that indie rock was capable of at the time that haven’t really been matched since, not even by Franz Ferdinand themselves.
#Sonds like franz ferdinand take me out full
But put “Take Me Out” on at full volume and it blows all such quibbles out of the water. This was music that did nothing new, that was transparently slapping on a modern veneer to music that was directly mimicking past influences like Blondie and Talking Heads. They don’t really do albums, an argument that isn’t intended to be at all derogatory considering how great and successful some of these singles were.
It is 2004 captured in a LP, for better and for worse.įranz Ferdinand are a singles band. Their debut album is music that is dripping in sex and swagger, all posturing and self-conscious cool to the point of so uncool that it’s cool again. There’s a reason that a song like “Take Me Out” became so inescapable on MTV. Listening to Franz Ferdinand now is very much a journey of nostalgia but this is an album of undeniable hook-filled monsters which are simultaneously dated and fresh as hell. You can’t undersell how big these two acts were when they both released their debut albums in 2004, how totally they both catapulted indie rock to a place of cultural domination again. Usually this is a conversation that revolves around bands like The Strokes and The White Stripes but a counterargument can be made that no two groups are more important to rock in the early 2000s than The Killers and Franz Ferdinand. In 2004 Franz Ferdinand released their self-titled debut album which launched not only their own careers but helped propel guitar driven music right back into the cultural spotlight again. Let’s clarify this picture a little with context. They’re both poised for a comeback of sorts, both acts responding to very similar realities of past and present. They make very different kinds of music but both share a similar history and, it would appear, a similar future.
It’s certainly a nice coincidence that both these bands just happen to release new material in such a short span of each other (“Always Ascending” for Franz Ferdinand, “Little Dark Age” for MGMT) but this circumstance only highlights further the unique yet shared platform on which both these groups stand. Such narratives are timeless and not purely just of this moment but few acts better represent the travails of what it means to be an ‘indie’ band over the last decade or so than these two. And like all things indie rock this is also a story of decline, of an extreme high and uncertain lows. They were the years of Franz Ferdinand and MGMT, years in which their cultural grip has never been more tight or more apparent.įranz Ferdinand and MGMT represent two chapters in indie rock’s evolution both sonically and as a cultural force. Those years for me were the mid to late 2000s. These artists best capture a certain sound that was en vogue at some precise moment, a moment that becomes firmly implanted in the sensibility of those at an impressionable moment in their development. Conversely, a lot of music that we have a deeply personal relationship with is not so iconic and much more relevant to a specific period of time. In the world of music, these figures come in the form of titans like The Beatles and Bob Dylan, artists whose influence is deeply integrated into much of cultural life since. Some of these artists are perennial features of most people’s lives, universally appreciated as integral to their respective canon and are therefore inescapable and essential. My youth, like anyone else’s, is a story in which certain artists are inseparable from the telling of that story.
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