What would you give for a tenth of the confidence with which Alex Kapranos carries himself? With five singles taken from Franz Ferdinand’s eponymous debut and time in their busy schedule to receive in person spurious awards from glossy men’s magazines and guest-edit music papers and newspaper supplements, the band’s frontman seemed to conduct himself as though the struggle for greatness was over.

How, you wondered, were Franz Ferdinand going to come down in time to record an album even half as good as its predecessor? Well, they’ve done it. You Could Have It So Much Better is an album half as good as its predecessor. If that seems like bad news, then let’s shine a light on the six or seven songs that still justify what your local supermarket will charge you for them. No problems where This Boy and You’re The Reason I ’m Leaving are concerned — adrenalised pop landslides that seem built to carry on where Take Me Out and Matinee left off. Lyrically, the major development is that Alex Kapranos is profoundly in love, and when he wants to tell us about it, his band oblige by resisting their boom-thump default mode of fortissimo fuzzpop for something altogether more dreamy.

The art-pop hardcore may be appalled then by the somnambulant waltz-time rapture of Fade Together, but not if they have a beating heart with which to respond to Kapranos’s delirious exhortations. Walk Away is as tender and preposterous as you’d expect from someone who cites the Smiths and Sparks as two of his prime influences. On Eleanor Put Your Boots On, his muse announces herself (it’s Eleanor Friedberger from the US indie darlings the Fiery Furnaces) amid a torrent of dramatic New York imagery and an ornate chamber pop arrangement that recalls the Divine Comedy at their pretentious best.

At its best You Can Have It Better is a strange record — there’s little recognisably Franzish about any of the above-mentioned love songs. At its worst, it’s stranger still. Take the current single, Do You Want To. Written by Kapranos after a party in which lots of starstruck people told him the kind of silly starstruck things that people say to famous people, it’s the sound of a band with a mighty swagger in its collective step. And yet, bereft of any humanity or indeed melody, it leaves you cold.

On the title track, Kapranos gives vent to his inner Mark E. Smith over a clattering atonal racket. It’ll probably sound great live, but along with the two songs that precede it (What You Meant, I’m Your Villain) what you hear on your CD is a triumph of chutzpah over content. After three or four listens, you find yourself wondering if you should be trying harder. Five or six, and you start to wonder if they should.

Domino

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