At the dawn of this millennium, bands like The Strokes, The White Stripes y The Hives They stylized old sounds with grace and substance, and that was called “retro-rock.” It is difficult to question the label, because the evidence was within reach of sight and ears, one could only say that the neologism that named that scene could also have fallen on two of the most important movements of the ’90s, such as grunge. and Brit-pop.
As it were, although obliquely, the Scots Franz Ferdinand They shared a litter, although other, more imprecise and extensive sources of water were available. Because in the utopia of post-punk, that enormous group of sounds and directions created after the cataclysm of 1977, the idea of retro is laughable. That could only happen once, in a multiform context and humus: Thatcher is no longer there, nor is punk the imminent past, nor is the cultural background of musicians & audience similar and multifocal. Trying to museumize or recreate it is condemning yourself to ridicule.
Alex Kapranos’ band is, rather, an update of what we could call “the Glasgow school”, a melodic-rhythmic mandate that was born in fellow citizens like Orange Juice y Altered Imagespride of the early ’80s of the third largest city in the United Kingdom, although Edinburgh and influential period bands such as Joseph K and the Fire Engines. Starting from that tradition, and with its own many merits, Franz Ferdinand became, two decades ago, a band with global reach.
On their sixth visit to Buenos Aires, they resumed their usual ritual: thundering the sound of their efficiency. Kapranos, from the original lineup, is only accompanied by bassist Bob Hardy, but the song is the same. As with its compositions and stage presentation (a kind of inclined arch in the same perspective as the band’s logo that is cut out behind), a show has nothing left over or missing. The nervous and choppy rhythm, oiled in its dry economy, the lyrics between sarcastic and abstract, and the charisma of a front-man who, as a friend says, knows that it would be worse to work.
Kapranos, in a shirt with black and white vertical stripes, looks like a character from an Aki Kaurismaki film if those films had protagonists whose fortunes changed. You don’t need to harangue: you are contagious. And he proposes, tacitly, dilemmas of the type: the show is one hour away, at least half more to go, and the band’s three perfect and unappealable hits have already been spent: Do You Want To, Take Me Out y The Dark of the MatineeHow will you maintain attention?
The point is that he pilots it. A while before, to that white reggae exercise called Build it Up They added a coda of The dance of the blackbirdsAmazonian tropical anthem. And, on the encores, he attacks some of the best classics from his debut: Jacqueline (with female observation lyrics worthy of Agnes Varda), the tense homoeroticism of Michael and the fiery geometry of This Fire. In the end, it turned out that the retro of twenty years ago is nothing, and the feverish look of this quintet can still offer entertainment and content with reciprocated effectiveness.