You Could Have It So Much Better

Amazon Review

You Could Have it So Much Better, the second album from Mercury Music Prize winners Franz Ferdinand is pretty much everything a band's second record should be: an assured, endearingly cocky return that builds on the strengths of its predecessor, and importantly, brings a few more tricks to the table.

Beyond hipster quips and hedonism, however, Franz are busy expanding their emotional palette. "Walk Away" is a fragile indie soul pi...  Read full review »

Best band of the 21st century, so far.

The 2 FF albums are the best albums of the 21st century, so far. Catchy tunes, crisp guitar/vo...  Read full review »

Not too shabby

Not quite as good as their first album but still enjoyable....  Read full review »

Why settle for Kilimangiro.... When you can mount Everest?

Following swiftly on from their debut, it's easy to think that Franz Ferdinand are striking whilst the iron is hot, rushing a new album in the law of diminishing returns. Not for them, the difficult second album.

"You Could Have It So Much Better" seems to fall effortlessly from the same pot of gold as their debut. It isn't a case of the Emporer's new clothes, but of a new regime. Hopefully kicking out the imposters and the other talentless drip charlatans with their pathetic inner demons, drug implants, and talent transplants, Der Franz take the angular artrock of postpunk and make it sound very now (as well as very Next Year) in a way that probably won't date.

Chock full of hits (even the songs that won't be hits sound like hits), from the pounding "Do You Want To?" to the closing "The Outsiders", Franz tap into classic imagery and reset it in a new frame. Lyrics are both specifically personal and ambigiously vague. A sound that is both idiosyncratically uniq...  Read full review »

A Witty and Entertaining Follow-Up

I'm somewhat disadvantaged in assessing this collection because I've never heard the first album - but believe me, it's on my Christmas List! In my experience, second albums released hastily on the back of a successful debut are nothing to write home about. And Mercury prize winners are another cause for suspicion in my book. However, this one is a big exception. It's imaginitive, interesting and (after quite a few listens) entertaining. But you've got to play it a lot of times and give it a chance! With the first hearing, I didn't think I'd enjoy it. And I was right - I didn't - apart from a couple of the more conventional-sounding tracks such as Eleanor and Walk Away. But that's not the time to write a review, which I suspect is the problem with most of the negative reviews here. Giving an album one star because it's not how you would like it to be misses the whole point of objective appraisal. Would you say Beethoven was rub...  Read full review »

Difficult but successful

I now see why everyone seems to say that second albums are difficult.
After their initial success, FF needed to prove that they were not a 1-hit wonder.
This album does just enough, but is not worth the full 5 stars.
I am waiting for the 3rd album to see whether they have honed their writing enough to survive....  Read full review »

Sitting on the fence...

OK, I admit that I really liked the first album. I listened to it alot, and passed this gem of knowledge on to all of my friends, telling them that Franz will be huge. I loved the raw sound and the mix of influences. This album fails to deliver all of that first album rawness, (why should it? It is a second album afterall). But it also fails to deliver any of the 'slap in the face' brilliant tunes of it's predecessor. True, there are some reasonable tunes he...  Read full review »