Gig review: Franz Ferdinand

Published on Monday 12 October 2009 18:56

FRANZ FERDINAND **** MUSIC HALL, ABERDEEN

FRANZ Ferdinand have reached a tipping point in their career. No longer the bright young things on the block whose every move is pored over by the national music press, their career has seen them develop into a band who blend reliability and consistency, without resorting to the overtly predictable.

Even better, there were one or two musical surprises on this first night of their latest UK tour. Not the kind that smack of desperate career reinvention, but the smoothly controlled added touches of a band who can sense their place in rock's extended pantheon, and don't want to be remembered as just the children of Scotland's early-1980s post-punk scene. The set-closing Outsiders, for example, moved from a neat Giorgio Moroder disco bassline into an extended, John Bonham-style outro of thundering drums, with drummer Paul Thomson barking a fairly un-Franzlike repeated mantra of "Aberdeen, can you make some noise?" as the whole band descended on his kit with drumsticks.

The encore was even more unexpected, with Lucid Dreams giving way to a full ten minutes of actual acid house music, as Kapranos bashed out a repeating keyboard line and hammered an electronic drum pad under club-like red lights.

There were no wholesale changes to the bulk of the set, however. No new tracks were debuted, but particular highlights such as Ulysses, Do You Want To?, Take Me Out and Shopping For Blood benefited from a new urgency and possibly a slight arrangement change here and there. It's unlikely that their fourth album will see them convert to dance music wholesale, but the fact the band are still willing to stretch themselves without compromising what they do best is heartening to see.