Franz Ferdinand – The Human Fear Review

Seven years after their previous album release Franz Ferdinand searches for the elusive next step. That desire for new success away from Take Me Out is palpable and like slobbering dogs spotting a hunk of meat with a heavy bone, they will stop at nothing. Tenacity is key for the band at this point and long may it continue. The Human Fear, their latest effort which featured dud lead single Audacious, is a chance to rekindle their refreshing love for new sounds, irrespective of which songs define them. Their forgettable opener must make good on what comes after it. The Human Fear pitches itself as a capture of the everyday horrors, those moments which chill your blood and rattle your skull. Their upbeat indie rock, pop-adjacent noise is quite the opposite of those tones, but have some faith. Some of it works.  

A softer glam rock approach to Audacious begins to build before a sudden end, the sense of not knowing when or how to bring a song to a natural conclusion is a stickler for Franz Ferdinand. The Human Fear feels like a slightly hollow attempt at making an art rock album of low octaves and promises of the unknown being better than the situation you find yourself in at present. Signs of their breezier attempts can be heard on Everydaydreamer, thoughts in the mind are projected not onto the world around you, but onto us, the listener. They offer very little beyond a sweet and instrumentally sound consistency. We do not turn to albums promising escapism for some neat bass work. Franz Ferdinand fails to pair their sub-genres. Instead, you get one of each per track. Dance-rock on The Doctor, glam rock on the opener. As a result, The Human Fear feels like moments of static rather than a roaring experience of self-hate and how to get over it.  

Lightweight instrumentals are the problem, and then it becomes a lyrical slump. Franz Ferdinand can never find the balance. Whenever Alex Kapranos finds a vocal tone worth following, as he does on Hooked, the instrumentals shift awkwardly and fail to back his punchy tone. The same goes for when the rhythm section gets their heads together and comes up with a bright and thorough moment, which Kapranos then shies away from. Every moment when Franz Ferdinand wants to be the serious, slick new band on the scene, as is the case for everyone trying to mount a comeback in this rock-influenced sphere, comes across as feign or faulty. Much of The Human Fear is relatively tame and likeable, but considering how momentous an album this could have been for Franz Ferdinand, it is hard not to feel disappointed by what amounts to a barebones experience with limited songs.  

An album of moments, and even then, those parts are only slivers of a song, rather than whole projects. Night or Day lives and dies on its piano and guitar blur but Kapranos writes with such a predictability, mentioned even on the track, that it dies within its first minute. Musical volatility does not benefit a band trying to reshape their image. It comes across as flippant and uncertain, and sudden Beach Boys-like sounds on Tell Me I Should Stay Here, is such a leftfield choice it blasts any preceding work on The Human Fear out of the water. A band reinventing themselves on the fly is not a cool occasion but one where the project suffers from a series of misdirections and insecurities, as is the case for Franz Ferdinand with their clunky and lopsided latest effort.  

With no sound of their own, The Human Fear is a plain amalgamation of other, popular genres, and Franz Ferdinand cannot leave their print on any of them. What few catchy moments come through, Cats, for instance, are so infrequent elsewhere that it feels like an afterthought. It staggers into Black Eyelashes and, once more, the tone and consistency Franz Ferdinand could build from is lost. The Human Fear feels more like a collection of vague ideas with no connection between one another despite the wide berth of what people fear. Yet they miss this too, obsessions with animalistic intent on the Cats and Black Eyelashes double bill before a turn to plain indie rock on Bar Lonely. Franz Ferdinand derailed what was always going to be a tricky seventh album.