A lithely and occasionally blithely curated chronological journey through the gangly Glaswegian art-rockers’ career to date, Hits To The Head is a powerful reminder of how FF has always been dangerously thrusty, invasive and a whole muscular limb full of fun. Handy.
When Franz Ferdinand’s self-titled debut arrived in February of 2004, it was almost ridiculous how utterly spot on it was for those 21st century times, with The Strokes and the White Stripes laying the groundwork for new the skinny-white-Anglo-guys-with-guitars model that hit Britain like a bomb, utterly dominating the post-millennium zeitgeist and leaving piles of hyped-up indie bands in their wake.
Everything got a lot livelier when these mod Scottish dance-whore boys showed up, wearing tighter trousers and flaunting catchier tunes than any band out there. With their admirable eschewing of gender heteronormativity, the Franz four-piece declared their mission was making “music for girls to dance to”.
Kanye West dubbed their sound “white crunk” and openly acknowledged that Franz were not only his favourite bunch of rockers cited the band as a primary influence on his lustrous Shirley Bassey-sampling Diamonds From Sierra Leone. This isn’t it.
With its frantic guitar jitters and an almost histrionic sense of melodrama, if you didn’t almost get into a couple of accidents “rocking out” to the visceral Queen-meets-Eye Of The Tiger pastiching of FF’s first big hit while behind the wheel, you definitely weren’t doing it right.
A ton of noise merchants were recycling old Gang Of Four post-punk riffs back then, but when Take Me Out announced itself out of nowhere, we critics — and the wider public at large — knew it was something special. Two decades later and its pulsating presence still makes you swing your hips, if not yer pants.
The band’s classic, choppy guitar action is accompanied by frontman Alex Kapranos’s lithe, gentlemanly vocal stylising, investigating romantic affectation and social ennui perfectly on superlative songs like The Dark Of The Matinée, Michael and, just 18 months later, the second album’s homoerotic centrepiece, the coruscating Do You Want To.
Of course, it’s 2022, and now we have, er…Imagine Dragons. So it’s obviously a relief that the Franz boys — now a quintet — are back with a long overdue “best of” collection (yes, in the push the button streaming world they do still exist), charmingly titled Hits To The Head.
They’ve already teased it out with a couple of new Stuart-Price produced additions, the funkariffic Curious saunters by without offending anyone but possibly The Killers; while the rousing Billy Goodbye leaves more of an impression with its glam Bowie-meets-Bolan ’70s stomp, the video for which looks like exactly the sort of party we should all be having right now, as we wait for the world to probably end very soon, thanks to the madman in Moscow.
“What’s the meaning behind the song?,” Kapranos asks of Billy. “I had this idea for the lyric – kind of the reverse of one of those life-flashing-before-your-mind-as-you-die film scenes, where the entire course of a relationship flashes before you the instant you fall in love with someone.”
And really, would we expect anything less of FF?
The collection kicks off with another of their early classics, the minor hit Darts Of Pleasure, which still sounds as rousing today as it was eighteen years ago.
Taking in the above-mentioned hype-starters coupled with a smattering of cult classics and alt.bangers, the anxious grooves of This Fire — once memorably covered by Lil Wayne — is a still a standout.
Following through, the underrated Ulysses and the gender clashing ecstasy-prowl of No You Girls liven things up with their incendiary, irresistible hooks and disco bloodbath energy.
Hits… then launches into the rest of the good stuff. The mod-prog of 2013’s Love Illumination reminds us of exactly what a young(ish) band playing guitars should sound like.
The spiky cod reggae of Stand On The Horizon, from 2014, is a fascinating curio, and essentially the Adam Ant song the insect warrior forgot to write during his nascent Dirk Wears White Sox era.
At a rounded twenty tracks, Hits To The Head is practically an entire treatise on brainy, modern 21st century rock ’n roll, complete with really good hair and begging to be noticed outfits.
“It’s the same as writing a set-list for a festival,” Kapranos explains of the tracklist decisions for the album, talking directly to a press release.
“You want to play the songs you know people want to hear. The hits. Bring the hits to the head. The heart. The feet. That means obvious singles, but also songs you know have a special meaning for both band and audience, like Outsiders.”
The singer then offers a rather diplomatic takedown of music snobbery, by contending that “you can still be a superfan if you just own the greatest hits album. Though we’re kind of thinking that music snobs were never up there in the front row with the rest of us at Franz Ferdinand shows.”
“I have friends who believe you’re somehow not a ‘real’ fan if you own a ‘best of’ rather than a discography. I disagree. I think of my parents’ record collection as a kid. I loved their compilation LPs. I am so grateful that they had Changes(OneBowie) or Rolled Gold. Those were my entrance point. My introduction.”
In practical terms, that means the Glaswegian art-rockers have excluded their FFS side project, the deliciously theatrical hook-up with veteran synth-pop duo Sparks, and odds and sods such as the Radio 1 Live Lounge cover of Bowie’s Sound And Vision (featuring that vocal cameo from the gorgeous Girls Aloud) and the 2006 AA-side L. Wells (one of my personal fave raves), though the other side of the 45, the furious The Fallen is present and very much correct. Despite its popularity, the stripped-back 45 Eleanor Put Your Boots On is noticeably absent too, making HTTH unapologetically high-octane throughout.
On the plus side, the decision to go with an alternate mix of 2008’s Lucid Dreams is inspired, being infinitely superior to the subsequent album mix in practically every way.
So, as notable for its omissions as its inclusions, Hits To The Head, surely, is Franz Ferdinand’s ChangesOneBowie rather than Pet Shop Boys Discography. Yet despite having the makings of a cash-grab, this compilation is not the cynical product it appears to be.
Times, formats and marketing have shifted so much that Franz Ferdinand doing something like this feels more like a genuine artistic statement; the cynical move would have been to compile a ubiquitous playlist and make it exclusive to the dreaded Spotify or something. Instead, the album feels like a genuine attempt to present a carefully constructed narrative of their career, but what is that narrative?
Listening to Hits To The Head from beginning to end, one gets the impression of a curiously mixed artistic progression. The early singles showcase a band that is supremely confident in their sound and style but who are understandably a little inexperienced in the songwriting department. As they progress, the tracks become more reliant on ideas and experiments rather than pure cocksure attitude, but that stylistic grounding dissipates as they try to reconfigure that tricky transition between dance and rock. As there are with any compilation, there are peaks and troughs. And a huge dollop of strange fascination indeed.
Though the signature Soviet Constructivist style cover art might not be the best timing right now, admittedly.
Steve Pafford
Franz Ferdinand are supporting Hits To The Head with live dates in Europe and North America from April to November. Though the band recently announced that due to “ongoing covid restrictions across Europe and the logistics involved with putting on a tour at this time, we have had to reschedule the first half of our upcoming tour.” So that means my nearest gig — at the architecturally outstanding new 6MIC facility in Aix-en-Provence — has been pushed back from 26 March to 23 October.
C’est la vie…
