Live

FRANZ FERDINAND, BORN RUFFIANS

RIALTO THEATRE

Sunday, April 19

What’s the purpose of visual effects in a live rock performance? Are
they supposed to make up for some shortcoming by misdirecting us with
spectacle? Or are they just the proverbial cherry on the sundae, adding
another component to what’s already entirely satisfying? Isn’t it
supposed to just be about the music?

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a band that incorporated major
effects into their live show, so my mind was kind of boggled by the
sophistication and detail of Sunday night’s performance by Scottish
alt-rockers Franz Ferdinand: A backdrop grid of shiny squares that
doubled as both a projection screen and objet d’art (evoking marbled
shower tiles when not illuminated; when lit, it looked like a retro
computer universe similar to the one Jeff Bridges stumbled through in
Tron). Six conspicuous monoliths resembling restaurant-patio
heat lamps flashing lavender bursts of light. Projected images of alien
suns, voodoo monkey masks, neon pin-up girls and German shepherds.

These kind of details remind you: Oh yeah, we’re seeing a
rich band.

Not that there’s anything wrong with pure spectacle. From Kiss to
Gwar to, say, Madonna, rock concerts dripping with excess and
theatricality are par for the course. But a band or performer lacking a
certain kind of inherent drama might get upstaged by their own glitz.
That might have been the case Sunday night, though it’s
difficult to be too hard on Franz Ferdinand, if for no other reason
than Alex Kapranos’ sex appeal. I can’t find any fault with their
renditions of the songs. Consisting mostly of work from their latest,
Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, and their eponymous debut (almost
entirely overlooking 2005’s excellent You Could Have It So Much
Better), their set sounded great.

Somehow, though, the band seemed to be undone by all the extras.
Their energy seemed relatively flat—not corpse-like, just
underwhelmed. To be fair, Nick McCarthy was on crutches. Yet the light
show and counterintuitive imagery reeked more of record-label packaging
than artistic expression, all in a way that appealed to the lowest
common denominator, as if the audience were incapable of sophistication
or insight.

Again, it was really impressive in the sense that it was
large-scale, brightly colored and repetitive. But I’ve never been one
to choose my desserts for the garnish.

This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2009.