Difficult third album, difficult second single…
[Video][Website]
[5.00]
Alex Wisgard: As far as I’m concerned, the Comic Relief special edition of Top Of The Pops was the moment the charts died for good; obviously they’ve been rendered irrelevant at least since TOTP was taken off air, but this was the first moment it hit home quite how boring and safe the charts have become (see also: Lady GaGa’s two number one singles). And sadly, sandwiched between “Islands in the Stream” and the new Oasis single (probably) was this latest effort from Franz; while “Ulysses” swaggered and strutted with purpose (ie: we’ve been away for ages, and look what new and exciting developments we’ve come up with in our big pop lab!), “No You Girls” is more of an undetermined plod. For all the talk of shunning choruses, the hooks are in just the right places and the eyebrows are raised at the perfect level. “No You Girls” is the sound of Franz Ferdinand on autopilot, and thanks to TOTP, I can no longer listen to it without imagining a white-suited David Tennant twatting around with a guitar. Bugger.
[5]
Renato Pagnani: Alex Kapranos translates one of Lil Wayne’s recent go-to lyrical techniques to rock on “No You Girls”: Instead of purposefully mispronouncing words so he can correct himself in the next line, he retracts entire phrases. Love you? Pfft. He’d love to get to know you. Sometimes he says the stupid things that he thinks? Er, he thinks the stupidest things. When Kapranos comes full circle, admitting that he and his sex are (at least) equally to blame for the mixed signals, misinterpretations and dick moves, the song shifts from sexist to clever in one of those a-ha! moments that feels gloriously triumphant. And somehow the band manages to stuff all their previous hits into a blender and end up with something that avoids sounding like any of them. I mean, too much like any of them.
[8]
Ian Mathers: At 3:42 it actually feels a bit overstuffed – that louche intro, which they smartly replicate later on, and the surging chorus are both nice, but they should be able to hit the high points and get out after, say, roughly 2:15, instead of ploughing over the same old ground. Although I guess that length lets the track go from “you girls don’t know how you make us boys feel, with your pouting and breasts and such” to “you boys don’t care how crappy you make girls feel, with your objectification and not calling the next day and such.” Advertizing is killing our attention spans!
[7]
Iain Mew: Franz Ferdinand long tried to present themselves as something a little more unsual and ambitious than the ordinary, and as long as they were producing startlingly great singles it just about held water. Now they seem almost reduced to self-parody, choosing the most obvious option at every point on a retread song that never does anything to justify its existence.
[3]
Edward Okulicz: It’s as if the scruffy and dirty but oh so taut disco stylings of their earlier work has been rendered impotent. The bassline does not jump, the lyrics do not exhort to dance or delight and its sleek tidiness could less charitably be seen as a lack of depth. The song isn’t too bad but it demanded a nastier, fuller production rather than this empty gleaming which is hookless, safe and sterile.
[4]
Keane Tzong: I like to think that were it not for Apple’s helping hand, people would have noticed that Franz Ferdinand have been peddling this one song since 2004, and shut their wallets accordingly. After all, they most likely own Franz Ferdinand already- is there any real need to spend any sum of money on the “privilege” of owning this song? No. But here we are. Another pick as disastrous as this and I’ll buy a fuckin’ Zune.
[2]
Additional Scores
Hillary Brown: [7]
Martin Kavka: [7]
Martin Skidmore: [2]