Franz Ferdinand: Tonight

ON THEIR eponymous 2004 outing, Franz knew exactly what they wanted to do and they executed it to perfection. They conjured something fresh from Orange Juice's bookworm funk, Roxy Music's devilish art-pop panache and disco-punk's slicing groove, while Alex Kapranos fashioned a persona that was at once brainy and horny, as if all his talk of constructivist art and highbrow cinema were just a cunning strategy to impress fine-boned art students at Godard retrospectives, the better to whisk them off to the club and thence to his boho bachelor bad. Likewise, his band seemed to offer not a long-term relationship but the buzz and flash of a fling. Like many great, self-contained debuts, it begged the question: what next?