Franz Ferdinand

After four years, Franz Ferdinand’s finally returned to the party. “Tonight: Franz Ferdinand,” their third album, finds the Scottish foursome still making dance floor-worthy post-punk. Their latest effort expands their signature style by adding more synthesizers and cranking up the bass in an attempt to satisfy the absurdly high expectations that grew over their long hiatus. However, while “Tonight” is a solid album, it is not as mind-blowingly awesome as it should be.

The album’s best tracks showcase Franz Ferdinand doing what they do best: beat-driven, catchy, darkly sly dance tunes. Lyrics from Ulysses (“So sinister, so sinister last night was wild / What’s a matter there, feeling kinda anxious?”) are a bit unnerving, demonstrating, as always, the darkness that can come with having a good time.

This time around, they mixed up the formula, adding more synth and dub influences. They have dabbled with synth before, but every song on this album, save one, heavily incorporates a synthesizer and electronic elements. “Ulysses” and “No You Girls” manage to stay true to the old Franz Ferdinand aesthetic while adding these newer elements. That said, they fail to replicate the magic of their most popular single, “Take Me Out.”

The album goes wrong when they depart almost completely from their template, evident in “Lucid Dreams.” The song clocks in at nearly 8 minutes and much of that is a dub odyssey with a lazy, reggae-influenced beat. The album’s version of “Lucid Dreams” is not to be confused with a different song released earlier this fall and found on the band’s website. The older version was a fun and catchy dance tune and could have been a second “This Fire,” if not “Take Me Out.” However, the album version veers too far into experimental, uncharted territory for Franz Ferdinand. Instead of the straightforward dance-rock, they substitute the catchy choruses for musing, fuzzy electro-noodlings.

The first half of the album is much better than the second. The second half’s main problem lies in some of the songs’ repetitiveness and slow pace. One would wish the band had been able to come up with tunes worth humming. The chilled out ending of“Lucid Dreams” slows the album down; it never recovers. The next song, “Dream Again,” is even slower, melodically unremarkable, and serves only as a transition to “Katherine Kiss Me.” The only acoustic song on the entire album, “Katherine Kiss Me,” emphasizes Kapranos’s voice by putting it up front in the mix. The melody is sweet but out of place with the rest of the album’s dance-punk aesthetic.

“Tonight” grows on you. For the most part, it’s fun to groove to. But, after spending four years minimally updating their sound, “Tonight: Franz Ferdinand” is inarguably a disappointment.

—Staff writer Candace I. Munroe can be reached at cimunroe@fas.harvard.edu.