Franz Ferdinand Go For Dirty, Dirty Pop

Made in Scotland, using Russian engineering with an aim for imperfection and grit, you either have a very bad nuke, or the new Franz Ferdinand album.

Three years after "You Could of Had it So Much Better", the lads are returning with the promise of a dirtier, grittier sound albeit still with a firm emphasis on pop sounds on their as-yet-untitled third studio album. The due date is expected around summertime.

For the album, the boys secluded themselves in the land of the Scots, planning to write the songs there before trekking to London town to record them in a lush expensive recording studio. But, says frontman Alex Kapranos, "We decided the ones we did in Glasgow sounded much better. There was a real dirtiness, edge and attitude [to them]."

Speaking to Billboard, the guitarist and singer said "We've decided we're going to do it up here, ourselves. It's funny, because logically everything is wrong. We should go to a big studio and spend millions. But logic is never appropriate when you're making music. You've gotta trust your instincts. This stuff made us want to get up and dance."

Hopefully explaining the 'Russian engineering' part of the intro, Kapranos continued "We found this thing called a Polyvox, built by a Russian engineer in the late '70s. He'd heard what a Moog was and had heard the sounds, but had no idea how to make one. He worked out how it would be made and made his version of what he thought a synth would be."

He concluded, "For me, the imperfections are what makes it perfect, like the cheapest, shittiest guitars through practice amps."

Personally we prefer the cheap, crappy, practice amp plug-in on Pro-Tools.