YOU COULD HAVE IT SO MUCH BETTER

A couple of years ago Bob, Alex, Nick and Paul got a group together. They said that they wanted to make girls dance or something. They've just recorded a new record: You Could Have It So Much Better With Franz Ferdinand. They didn't feel too comfortable about the idea of going into the professional, but anodyne, environment of a studio to write and record again.

They reckoned that a studio was just a building with a fancy tape recorder and other gear in it, and that they could record where they liked. They wanted it to be like it was when they started out, hanging around in each other's flats, having a drink, making up a few tunes. They ended up going into the countryside, a wee bit South of Glasgow, where they all lived in a house together. Just like The Monkeys. YCHISMB sounds like Franz Ferdinand, but not like their first record. It's unarguably them. It seems impossible for them to play in a room together and for it to not sound like them.

They didn't want to repeat themselves, though. Where's the fun in doing the same thing twice? They've gone a bit further in a few directions they hinted at before. This album has more width and depth. The group that wanted to do more than they'd done before. While sticking rigidly to the idea that there shouldn't be anything on the record that they didn't play themselves, there are more sounds and richer sounds. There's a desire to be adventurous, without ramming it home. To be ambitious with the arrangements and the melody, to do things that we haven't heard in music before, without drawing attention to them. They didn't want people to think ''hmm, these guys are really smart'', but ''oh, that was a good bit''. You hear that sense of adventure occasionally in pop music.