1 Dec 2009 by Chris     No Comments    Posted under: Entertainment

Albums of the Decade: No.20

Franz Ferdinand by Franz Ferdinand

“Ich heisse superfantastich!”
Times 100 Best Albums of the Decade: No.60
Pitchfork Top 200 Albums of the Decade: No.101
eMusic 100 Best Albums of the Decade: No.33
Uncut 150 Albums of the Decade: No.148

So we kick off my list of favourite albums of the past ten years with one which received “universal acclaim“, including the Mercury Music Prize, in 2004. Franz Ferdinand didn’t disappoint any of us whose introduction to the band of that ilk had been Take Me Out – “audibly the best single by a British guitar band in years”, according to Alex Petridis in The Guardian. My abiding memory of that single was one of those very rare WTF moments on Top Of The Pops – that stirring intro promising so much, but the whole song stopping after 55 seconds, and then restarting as something equally different, and just as good. What just happened there?

If five brilliant moments propel an album into the “great” league, this one comfortably qualifies, with Take Me Out accounting for two of them, along with the introduction from Jacqueline, the bizarre climax of Darts of Pleasure and the mysterious brilliance of Michael. You can detect a lot of Franz Ferdinand’s influences, but who’d have thought they’d have influenced so many more bands themselves? Franz Ferdinand really is an album full of killers.

I caught the band live just once, in a Big Top tent at the fantastic little Loopallu festival in Ullapool, which is about the same latitude as Stockholm and about 12 hours’ drive north from Cherry Hinton. Occasionally at a festival you see an act which is such a class above anything else that it brings the place to a momentary standstill (I’m also thinking of James Taylor at the Cambridge Folk Festival a few years ago). Franz Ferdinand were one of those bands. They may never hit the peak of their first album again, but that’ll do me.

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