With the possible exception of Arcade Fire's Funeral, no debut album in 2004 received such an unabashedly positive critical response as Franz Ferdinand.
Finding a mostly unexplored niche between post-punk (almost totally foreign at the time to any non-hipster outside of England in the early 1980s) and new wave, Franz Ferdinand went from playing in abandoned buildings to winning the Mercury Music Prize in the span of a year. Their mix of spy guitars, disco drums and impeccable style did for dress slacks what Kurt Cobain did for Chuck Taylors and flannel, and they came on the front end of a wave of '80s-influenced bands that would come to encompass everything from the eye-liner and synthesizers of the Killers to the manic drums of Bloc Party.
Given the popularity of their debut, the fact that the '80s revival they helped to spark is still in full force, and the relatively short amount of time that has elapsed since Franz Ferdinand broke into the mainstream, one would expect You Could Have It So Much Better to closely resemble its predecessor.
Certainly, the catchy, angular guitars and drums that hit halfway between punk and disco that characterized the first album are still here. However, the flow and consistency of the nearly flawless debut are not. While Franz Ferdinand had not an ounce of fat from start to finish, You Could Have It So Much Better is an album of fantastic highs and mediocre lows.
The new album starts off in style with \The Fallen,"" which makes good use of Nick McCarthy's aggressive guitar lines to find just the right balance of menace and charm. It's followed by the album's first single, ""Do You Want To,"" which builds on the goofy homoeroticism of ""Michael"" and a great, cheesy synthesizer riff but lacks the hooks of any of the their past singles. ""I'm Your Villain"" and ""Outsiders"" follow in a similar vein as fine additions to the band's collection of smart, gritty dance tracks, but don't break any new ground.
The first real surprise pops up when ""Walk Away"" slows down into a terrific acoustic verse that builds to a chorus without any of the awkward transitions that cut the momentum of some of the otherwise-great tracks on the disc.
Alex Kapranos' lyrics have never been more cryptic, jumping from the end of a relationship to the closing line ""Stalin smiles and Hitler laughs / Churchill claps Mao Zedong on the back."" The high point of the album comes when the band moves even further away from their trademark cocksure swagger with the brilliant, piano-driven ""Eleanor Put Your Boots Back On,"" one of two tracks here that could almost be an unreleased Beatles song. When the guitars drop out and only the theme is left, echoing right on the edge of audibility, it would be worth buying the entire album for that moment alone.
With how many excellent tracks there are on You Could Have It So Much Better, it's impossible to say too many harsh words against it. After all, it's very good, even occasionally great, but with songs like ""Eleanor"" and ""Walk Away,"" it sounds like Franz Ferdinand can do even better.
