Fortunate sons The simple joys of being this year’s Franz Ferdinand BY SCOTT FRAMPTON

Franz Ferdinand are this year’s Franz Ferdinand. Let me explain: a hoary music-business maxim holds that an artist’s second record will disappoint. It’s called the Sophomore Slump. And it’s bullshit. Sure, bands often get full of themselves and really suck with the follow-up to a big album, and that doesn’t even count the bands who’ve had exactly one good idea in their careers. No, it’s bullshit because it’s meaningless to anyone who buys music to enjoy it. But it’s the sort of idea that’s venerated, like music-chart positions and weekend box-office grosses, by all the marketing-meeting cant that passes for criticism these days — "The Bravery are this year’s the Killers!" Hence, much of the focus on You Could Have It So Much Better . . . With Franz Ferdinand (Epic) will be on how Franz Ferdinand have followed up last year’s breakout debut.

Well, they’ve followed up Franz Ferdinand (Epic) by realizing that they were very, very lucky the first time around, so why not savor their good fortune? This became clear when I dropped in on the New York set of their music video for the new disc’s first single, "Do You Want To?" Videos, like sausage and Pam Anderson’s breasts, are better enjoyed with no knowledge of how they were made. The shoots are even more chaotic and absurd than the quick-cut fantasies they produce, and most artists are shuttled through them like cattle nosing toward the abattoir.

The funny thing was how much Alex Kapranos and his identically dressed mates made a point of enjoying themselves amid the ridiculousness. (How ridiculous? The band was vaulted from a huge bed into a phalanx of professionally weird-looking extras and spindly models in granny panties, take after take, for an hour and a half. And the champagne in their glasses was diet ginger ale.) If you’re looking for a metaphor here — and I wasn’t at the time, since I was there only to get a few quotes from Alex about his new CD and sartorial flair for Esquire — it doesn’t take too much thought to see how that attitude extended to the whole enterprise of the feared sophomore album. Take your job, but not yourself, very seriously; expectations and everything else are bullshit.

This resonates in the confidence of You Could Have It So Much Better . . . With Franz Ferdinand. The band still sound like a band signed to Domino (the cool-as-fuck British label known for Clinic, Clearlake, and Four Tet), but one bent on inviting more people to the party. The same angular guitars that drove "Take Me Out" into the squinting gaze of the mainstream — hell, the song is available sung by children on Kidz Bop 8 — are in abundance, but the grooves are deeper and danceable. For every purely punchy song like the de facto title track, "You Could Have It So Much Better," there’s one that marries post-punk spikiness with the swing of a seductively open hi-hat. It’s both arty and utilitarian, like the Michael Graves appliances at Target.

" ‘Outside’ is very much like a dance song, the structures and dynamics of dance music," Kapranos said once he got a break from the video, a couple hours after it had been scheduled. "But it’s still very much a live band as well. All that great dance music is sequenced, but we wanted to have that pull and sway that you get when you play off each other. That was quite important to us when we were recording, to make sure that it was the sound of four people playing in a room together that we got onto the record."

Which is brilliant, except that there’s no conclusive evidence that people still dance to rock bands. Sure, it happens in some hipster conclaves, but after the ’90s irony pandemic, no one’s sure whether it’s actual dancing or a series of spastic poses. Mostly dancing is still relegated to clubs that pound out bowel-loosening, four-on-four bass beats. So we can be pretty certain that no one’s asked for this from Franz Ferdinand. The idea seems to have come from what Kapranos expresses as "We wanted to go in and make sure we still sounded like us but do something new. There’s no point in repeating yourselves."

So the single is the overtly, obnoxiously catchy "Do You Want To?" "This Boy," which follows, might well have been the easier choice, since it tracks more closely to "Take Me Out." Maybe too the morally ambiguous "The Fallen." But this single, the song meant to win over radio programmers who still aren’t sure how they let these Scottish guys run all over their play lists to begin with, is different. It’s drily funky and cheeky as all hell, with a new-wavy sing-along hook and lyrics built on pick-up banalities and arrogant mania: "When I woke up tonight, I said ‘I’m going to make somebody love me . . . And now I know, now I know, now I know/I know that it’s you/You’re lucky, lucky! You’re so lucky!" I may never watch Taradise the same way again.

Fuck, though. It’s all so smart. The dreamy "Eleanor Put Your Boots On" is affecting poetry about a Brooklyn-to-Scotland romance borne aloft on the Gulf Stream; the equally sensitive "Walk Away" rubs astringent on a relationship until the fade-out echoes with the mysteriously cracked "Stalin smiles and Hitler bows/Winston Churchill claps Mao Zedong on the back." Or take "You’re the Reason I’m Leaving." You can project your most recent romantic argument onto a line like "I have no idea if in four years I’ll be hanging from a beam." Here’s Kapranos’s explanation: "The last verse of that song is about the time I was driving to a friend of mine’s funeral. I was driving in the car, and it was under this fantastically optimistic springtime sun sometime in late March a few years ago. I was feeling overwhelmingly, obviously horrible, horrible that this guy died, and at the same time, the weather wasn’t matching up. And then a song came on the radio which I didn’t like, one of those slightly saccharine romantic songs. The sentiment of the song really struck me. As I was driving, I began cursing this dead guy whose funeral I was going to, like, ‘You sod! I’m here crying to this song I don’t like because I’m going to your funeral!’ And that’s an example of when you have all those contrasting emotions pulling you in so many different directions."

Find something else that complex from a band who’ve been on a Now That’s What I Call Music comp. But then, they never did sound like a band who should’ve gotten as big as they did. And now, with the challenging but altogether likable and accessible You Could Have It So Much Better . . . With Franz Ferdinand, they again don’t sound like one of those bands. Who knows whether this CD will succeed on the scale of the first one, but the mere prospect of Franz Ferdinand’s again landing on pop radio may be the season’s best reason to poke your head out of your narrow-cast prairie-dog mound. That’s why Franz Ferdinand is this year’s Franz Ferdinand.

"The only way you can ever keep your cool is by not trying to be cool," Kapranos said toward the end of our short interview. "Abandon all sense of self-consciousness — do it and enjoy it."