Franz Ferdinand's Scots are back after seven years of absence with a seventh album called “The Human Fear”, released on January 10. A little over twenty years after its innovative debut, the rock group now appears more commercially calibrated than original.
A little more than twenty years after “Take Me Out”, an atypical and explosive hit which caused a tidal wave both in the charts and on the dancefloors of independent rock, Franz Ferdinand is back with a seventh studio album called “The Human Fear”.
After seven years of absence from record, the Scots rehash the pop-rock formula which allowed them, for their debut in 2004, to win the Mercury Music Prize for best British album.
Minus modernity and the element of surprise, “The Human Fear” still contains influences from the Beatles, Queen and synthetic pop from the 1980s. But if Franz Ferdinand's verses may resemble old Franz Ferdinand, the choruses evolve a little and aim at other worlds, according to singer Alex Kapranos who believes that the title “Audacious” for example makes the transition between the two versions of the group.
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Outrageously eighties pianos and keyboards
Formerly a refreshing, modern and promising cross between Roxy Music and Talking Heads, Franz Ferdinand has today been calibrated and sanitized to offer an effective and melodic repertoire, but recognizable and without surprises. A more commercial turn which has little originality, except perhaps on “Black Eyelashes” where Alex Kapranos injects his Greek roots by drawing on rebetiko with a bouzouki and manages to bring a little depth.
-Also wanting to include outrageously eighties pianos and keyboards at all costs to confirm the acknowledged legacy of the Talking Heads or the unacknowledged legacy of Michel Berger (“Night or Day” which evokes “The Pianist's Groupie”) in his repertoire, Franz Ferdinand often loses on the path of its evolution.
Even if “The Human Fear” evokes in each song a particular fear among these individual or universal fears which cross us (fear of seeing one's life collapse, of leaving one's job or of leaving someone), it is the fear of Franz Ferdinand's loss of rock identity which is the most to be feared today.
Radio subject: Yves Zahno
Adaptation web: Olivier Horner
Franz Ferdinand, “The Human Fear” (Domino Recording). Sorti le 10 janvier 2025.
In concert at X-TRA, Zurich, February 21, 2025.
France
Music
