Franz Ferdinand's Night Moves : Rolling Stone

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McCarthy and Thomson are each married (the soft-spoken drummer has two kids), and for years Kapranos has dated Fiery Furnaces singer Eleanor Friedberger, who lives in Brooklyn. Though he'll happily discuss his lyrics, U.K. politics ("People are disillusioned by Labour") and his band's pop peers ("I don't understand that Killers lyric — I thought dancing was one of the most human things you could do"), Kapranos holds his tongue when it comes to his girlfriend. All he'll say is that she hates his tiny Glasgow apartment, which he has kept for more than eight years. "She can't stand it," he says. "She says, 'Why are you still living here?' But everything that's happened over the past five years has been incomprehensible. I go back to that apartment, with the same furniture and the same books on the shelf, and imagine that none of this ever happened. I like to do that."

As the band members were sequencing the record, they discovered that they had inadvertently told a story. "There was a nighttime theme," says Kapranos. Imagine the loose concept of a young man's debauched night on the town, beginning with getting high ("Ulysses"), a first kiss ("No You Girls") and getting ditched by the girl ("Can't Stop Feeling"). Halfway through Tonight's 10th track, the eight-minute "Lucid Dreams," the album shifts into a superheavy synth-and-drums instrumental section. "That's the climax of the night, coming down off the peak," says Kapranos. Closing the album are "Dream Again," a floaty, Beatlesque gem, and "Katherine Kiss Me," which directly echoes many of the lyrics from "No You Girls." "That's like the harsh light of dawn," says Kapranos, who admits that there is, in fact, a girl named Katherine, whom he "kissed a long time ago."

Onstage in San Diego, Franz blast through fan favorites like "Michael" and "This Fire" for a surprisingly diverse crowd of hipsters, hippies, cougars and a dude wearing a turban — who are all sent pogoing during the one-two punch of "Take Me Out" and "Ulysses." While Thomson and Hardy pummel out rock-steady rhythms, all eyes are focused on the guitar duo, who sway, jump and tap their feet in perfect synchronization. ("People ask us who does our choreography," says Kapranos. "I say, 'You think a choreographer would come up with shit like that?'") And for all the experimentation, the new tunes fit in seamlessly. "That three or four months we took off was about flushing away all of the bullshit that surrounds us," Kapranos says after the show. "Once we got that out of our systems, it was about walking into a room, seeing your three best friends and getting excited about making a record. We were lost, but it's when you admit you're lost that you can discover things."

[From Issue 1071 — February 5, 2009]

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