This past Wednesday, Scottish art-rock greats Franz Ferdinand completed a two-nighter at Vancouver’s historic Commodore Ballroom with a performance that showcased the unwavering enthusiasm that’s helped cement them as one of the most enduring bands to emerge from the early 2000s.
When a band sweats hard during the first song, you know you’re in for a high-octane set, and that’s exactly what the night’s openers, the Telescreens, delivered. The New York City by way of Los Angeles band is well seasoned, having formed at least eight years ago, and it showed in the mostly black-clad (there’s always the one member in blue jeans) rock quartet’s emphatic, precision playing. Singer-guitarist Jackson Hamm hit all the typical stage moves – triumphantly hoisting his guitar in the air, bounding across the stage, beckoning the audience to get louder, louder, louder! – with unshakable confidence. The Telescreens hooked the audience from the jump (always a tall task in the opening slot) and riled them up even more when Hamm complied with the compulsory act of flattering Vancouverites about the city’s mountains. “We’ve never been anywhere like this! We live in the DIRT!” Hamm claimed. Whether that’s fact or fiction is irrelevant; after all, what’s rock ‘n’ roll without a dose of mythology?
Franz Ferdinand kept the energy consistently high, blasting out of the gate with the frantic desperation of “Bar Lonely.” The selections from their latest sixth album, this year’s The Human Fear, kept pouring in with the jaunty, opulent “Audacious,” the stark “Night Or Day,” and the alluring “Build It Up.” Synths and grooves feature heavily on these latter two songs but nowhere nearly as much as on the playful “Hooked” where a heavy-handed, vintage synth groove forms the song’s backbone. And then there was “Black Eyelashes,” one of the brightest highlights on The Human Fear, if not in Franz Ferdinand’s entire repertoire. The song claimed similar status in Franz Ferdinand’s set. Given that Kapranos explores his Greek heritage on “Black Eyelashes,” and it draws melodic and structural influence from rebitiko music, it was only fitting that he performed it on bouzouki, a long-necked lute instrument popular in Greek music.
Kapranos is and always has been a consummate showman. Even when he hit the cliche moves, he took it a step further. Anyone can google a listicle and name-drop a beloved local institution, but when he dedicated “No You Girls” to Neptoon Records, he shouted out their staffers (and Neptoon associate Nardwuar) by their names.
It’s understandable why artists play reworked versions of their most beloved hits live, but when Franz Ferdinand busted out 21-year-old classics like “Take Me Out,” “This Fire,” “Jacqueline,” “The Dark of the Matinee,” and “Michael,” they proved that there’s something to be said for hearing such favourites straight up, unadulterated, especially for those who’ve never been fortunate enough to see the band even once up until last night. And that Franz Ferdinand can still do it with a smile on their faces is a testament to the love they have for music and performing.
And on that note, when a band generally keeps its performances faithful to its songs’ original structures, when the band does deviate even in the slightest, it leaves a more memorable impression. Case in point: Franz Ferdinand’s final number, “This Fire.” It’ll be difficult to forget the image or sound of Kapranos and Dino Bardot facing off on a riser and exchanging discordant, playful swipes at each other’s guitar strings. Whether fans at the Commodore waited 21 years to see Franz Ferdinand or they caught both shows, Wednesday night was one they won’t soon forget.
Photo and words by Leslie Ken Chu
order tickets for Franz Ferdinand HERE
