You're lucky lucky - you're so lucky

Continuing my trip back through the 2005 album charts.

09/10/05 : You Could Have It So Much Better - Franz Ferdinand

Another one I own - I think I listened to it twice and went "meh".  I seem to recall it's all perfectly fine, but just not as good as their debut, which is always a risk for bands with cracking debut albums.  But let's see how it's stood the test of time...

Actually, it's held up pretty well.  It feels like I should have given it a few more listens back in the day - there's certainly potential for it to be a grower.  It also, unlike quite a few recent albums has some obvious high points with "Do You Want To" and "Walk Away" standing out for me, although this could well be because they were singles.  I suspect the reason I didn't get with this at the time is that it's slightly less accessible than their debut - amusingly just last night I saw Alex Kapranos in Edgar Wright's documentary on the band Sparks and he was saying how much he loved the fact that Sparks enjoyed challenging their audience and there definitely feels to be a bit of that going on here.  But I currently feel I probably should have accepted the challenge.

We're at #1 with a new entry this week on the start of a 25 week run - a decent effort, but not the 82 weeks their debut offering enjoyed.  The rest of the top five were Katie Melua, James Blunt, David Gray and KT Tunstall (it's a good week for singer-songwriters!) and the next highest new entry is Paul Anka (#9 with his swing covers album, which is surprisingly well done).

Wikipedia has quite a lot on the album, but most of it is about how they weren't going to name the album, but at the last minute they did!  Fascinating, eh?  It also describes the album as being in the "dance-punk" genre which is a bit odd seeing as how it's most definitely neither of those things.  The critics obviously loved the album but it did surprisingly well commercially globally, getting to the top ten across most of Europe (#2 in Germany and Ireland) and #8 in the US, which is considerably better than I'd expect.

"Customers also listened to" The Strokes, Kaiser Chiefs, The Fratellis and The Hives - which is an interesting list because all but one of those bands, like FF, have a great sense of humour, whereas The Strokes have no discernible sense of any humanity at all.  I'm glad I gave this another go - I might even try and give it another listen soon-ish to see if it continues to improve its reputation.

02/10/05 - Enough variety to make it bearable
16/10/05 - Uncertain on first listen

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