franz ferdinand – blood

• 22nd May 2009

The Caledonian hipsters are back with a new take on their latest album ‘Tonight: Franz Ferdinand’. Touted as a ‘companion album’, it remixes nine of the twelve tracks in a dub stylee.

I have to be honest, this was a tough album to review. Every song takes the same approach to reworking the original – use a couple of vocal hooks, muck around with the EQ, throw in some synth blarts to set your teeth on edge and drench everything with lashings of reverb and delay – which makes having something interesting to say about each track a challenge.

Let’s have a look at the notes I made whilst listening to it:

‘Feel The Pressure’ – Fart-in-the-bath sound effects done much better by the Joe 90 theme tune.

‘Die On The Floor’ – Synth sounds like Roobarb and Custard via a KGB brainwashing session.

‘Backwards On My Face’ – Vocoder dodginess. Cylon windypops?

‘Feeling Kind of Anxious’ – More KGB keyboards to finish off the job.

‘Be Afraid’ – Sounds like one of those annoying buggers who clangs the teaspoon against their mug when stirring their tea.

Credit can be given for trying something new with the material, but in doing so they’ve sucked out anything that makes it appealing in the first place. Although a lot of their stuff sounds a bit samey, they have a knack with the kind of earnest disco that wriggles through your eardrum into your brain like one of those eel thingies that Chekov cops in Star Trek II. By comparison, this sounds like the inside of a heroin addicts head as he’s going cold turkey at the bottom of a disused well.

Blood? Bloody awful.