Franz Ferdinand Album: "You Could Have It So Much Better" Release Date: Oct 4, 2005 Label: Sony Rock-Rev Value: [7.5/10] Genre: Rock Styles: Indie Rock, Alternative Pop-Rock Buy It

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review by: Allmusic
album value: (4.5/5)
reviewer Heather Phares

Opting not to fix what broke them, You Could Have It So Much Better serves up more of the stylish, angular sound that worked so well on Franz Ferdinand's debut. After years of rehearsing in abandoned Glasgow warehouses and playing in relatively obscure groups like the Yummy Fur, it's perfectly understandable why the band chose not to mess with a good thing -- and why they chose to follow up the breakthrough success of Franz Ferdinand so quickly. But, after a year and a half of near-instant acclaim and constant touring, Franz Ferdinand return with songs that just aren't as consistently good as the album that made them so successful in the first place. A lot of You Could Have It So Much Better feels like a super-stylized caricature of the band's sound, with exaggeratedly spiky guitars, brooding crooning, and punky-yet-danceable beats. This isn't an entirely bad thing: "The Fallen" begins the album with a wicked, gleeful welcome back that embraces the jaunty mischief running through most of Franz Ferdinand's best moments, while "I'm Your Villain" effortlessly nails the darkly sexy vibe they strived for on Franz Ferdinand. Meanwhile, the famous friends, arty parties, and "shocking" homoeroticism of "Do You Want To" -- which feels more like a victory lap than a comeback single -- play like knowing, tongue-in-cheek self-parody. However, too many tracks on You Could Have It So Much Better are witty and energetic in the moment but aren't especially memorable. "You're the Reason I'm Leaving," "What You Meant," "This Boy," and the oddly anti-climactic finale, "Outsiders," are Franz-lite -- not at all bad, but not as good as even their early B-sides and certainly not up to the level of "Take Me Out." What helps save the album from being completely predictable are slower moments like the pretty, jangly "Walk Away" and atmospheric, piano-driven songs such as "Fade Together" (which really should've been the final track). Best of all is "Eleanor Put Your Boots On," a gorgeous, Beatlesque ballad that suggests that if Franz Ferdinand have songs this good in them, they're selling themselves, and their fans, short with most of the songs here (you could have it so much better, indeed). Not so much a sophomore slump as a rushed follow-up, You Could Have It So Much Better probably would've been better if Franz Ferdinand had waited until they had a batch of songs as consistent as their first album, but as it stands, it's still pretty good.

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review by: Pitchfork
album value: (8.3/10)
reviewer Nitsuh Abebe


You've probably clicked over here to see if the boys in this band could be suffering from any form of second-album slouching. Here's the thing, though: I'm not convinced these boys make albums. Not like that, and not in those terms. Sometimes, when we call an act a "singles band," we mean something cruel and obvious-- that their album tracks just aren't very good. But with Franz Ferdinand, we mean something kinder: that their whole project, their whole system of stylish poses and cocksure guitar stomps, just happens to work better in discrete, surprising, three-minute blasts. It's damned generous of them, really. And like Duran Duran-- the band whose sound these guys spent parts of their first album hybridizing with some vintage Josef K and Monochrome Set post-punk stuff-- chances are they'll continue making solid LPs from which we mostly just cherish and remember the hits.

That's the report from You Could Have It So Much Better, which does a lot to lock in that M.O. As it turns out, Franz Ferdinand, like many an effective singles band, are immensely more lovable when they're on top of the world. Casual, insouciant greatness is kind of their thing, and these cocky kids seem to have known it from Day One-- just consider "Take Me Out", where they spend half a minute pretending to sound like the Strokes before pulping their way down into something much better. And then consider "Do You Want To", the lead single from this album. Give these guys the Mercury Prize, and do they sit down fretting about making some kind of serious statement? No, they come back with a big ridiculous stomper, a song whose hooks get so happily ballroom-glam you'd almost think they stole them from the Sweet or the Bay City Rollers-- the kind of song most bands wouldn't be able to pull off without telegraphing a whole lot of irony and embarrassment. (...)

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review by: RollingStone
album value: (3.5/5)
reviewer DAVID FRICKE

"Do You Want To" -- the first single from the second album by punk-pop Scots Franz Ferdinand -- starts the same way all great rock & roll dance-party 45s of the mid-Sixties did: in mono. For the first eighteen seconds, the entire band is, if you're listening with headphones, crammed into the center of your cranium: the cutting unison guitars of Alex Kapranos and Nick McCarthy; the interlocked swagger of bassist Bob Hardy and drummer Paul Thomson; Kapranos' arrogant vocal cheer -- "I'm gonna make somebody love me" -- sugared with sweet-whine harmonies. Then the music goes widescreen. The guitars fan out in snarling stereo; the bass and drums goose-step up the middle. And when that doot doo-doot vocal hook kicks in, it sounds like a gang of droogs busting up a 1965 Beach Boys session.

Franz Ferdinand easily won the Kings of the New Wave Revival sweepstakes -- trumping British peers like Bloc Party and the Futureheads -- with the Sta-Prest jump and firecracker choruses of their 2004 debut, Franz Ferdinand. But the tight lightning on You Could Have It So Much Better shows deeper roots in the first wave of white electric dance music: specifically the crunchy-guitar R&B and arch-garage songwriting of 1965-67 Kinks. The creeping intro of guitar and kick drum in "Evil and a Heathen" snaps me back to "Milk Cow Blues" on The Kink Kontroversy, and the way Kapranos and McCarthy fire up "The Fallen" and "You're the Reason I'm Leaving" with pitted grinding riffs instead of power chords is right out of the "You Really Got Me" composer's manual. On top of that, Kapranos often sings in a sighing tenor that suggests a less precious Ray Davies with a hipster-ennui dash of the Strokes' Julian Casablancas, especially next to the parlor-piano rolls in "Eleanor Put Your Boots On." Either by accident or conscious homage, Franz Ferdinand have made an album that, in more places and ways than you'd expect, is closer to Face to Face than to Gang of Four's Entertainment! (...)

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