Aka: How Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos has subtly but effectively styled and shaped the look and sound of modern popular music
LIKE Bloc Party, Kaiser Chiefs received a substantial help-out from the Franz Ferdinand singer, and there's a few more Kapranos-endorsed bands - The Departure, Maximo Park - on the blocks ready to further spread the intelligent, angular, art-rock sound. The first real musical movement since the heady Oasis/Blur Britpop days is now officially a scene and comes complete with not only its own sound and favoured producers, but also a dress sense and a strident indie sensibility.
Typically, these bands are in their mid-twenties, share the same early-'80s musical reference points and favour a dress code of skinny, narrow trousers; tight shirts and narrow ties. The leather jacket, ripped denims, Converse trainer look is so out.
The anthems are already arriving, starting with FF's Take Me Out, on to Bloc Party's Helicopter and now Kaiser Chiefs' I Predict a Riot, with a fantastic cover of Hounds of Love by Futureheads waiting in the wings.
What distinguishes these bands is that they are all signed to small indie labels; they all prefer to play in unorthodox venues (car-parks, etc); they all like, and are supportive of, each other (for the moment); and they tend to hail from the less glamorous cities: Sunderland (Futureheads), Leeds (Kaiser Chiefs), Northampton (The Departure), and Newcastle (Maximo Park). And they've all seen what cocaine can do to a band (Oasis's third album).
The bands are a lot more literate than their predecessors - they drop names such as Irish Murdoch and Aldous Huxley in interviews. The scene also has its own in-house producer in Paul Epworth, who is to the sound what Steve Albini was to grunge, and even has its own Rough Trade/Creation style label in B-unique.
With the commercial success of Franz Ferdinand, the major labels have belatedly caught up with the shifting musical pattern and just as they ran around desperately looking for a "punk" band, then a "grunge" band, then a "Britpop" band, they are now throwing money at any assembly of four to five people who look like they've listened to a Joy Division or a Fall album. We await art.rock's version of Northern Uproar, but until then... dig the new breed.
