Monday, November 13, 2006

Second-album syndrome

I'll be interested to see if the class of '04 can come up with the goods this year - Razorlight, Kasabian, Interpol, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Futureheads, the Bravery, the Zutons, the Caesars.... Franz Ferdinand have raised the bar for second albums, let's see who can step up and match them.
I wrote this in my first post on this blog, on 5 January of this year. Well the second albums have come and gone (please can we stop using that horrible word 'sophomore'? It means a second-year American student, FFS) some (Kasabian, Killers, YYYs) acceptably decent, others (Razorlight, Futureheads) a pale shadow of the potential shown on the first albums, but all of them missing that spark that makes you shout YESSS!

One of the names missing from my original list is Bloc Party. Their second album, Weekend In The City, is not due out until February 2007, so it doesn't count as an '06 release anyway - or does it? An early mix of the album has been leaked online in the past few days and I've been lucky enough to get my hands on a copy. To say that it has the wow factor missing from the second albums mentioned above is putting it lightly - very lightly. This album is making the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I even just caught myself headbanging at my desk.

So be excited. Be very excited!

You can download live versions of various tracks off the album from my fellow bloggers at Good Weather for Airstrikes blog here, and read the official track-by-track guide published in this week's NME here.

And here's a video of them performing track 2, Hunting for Witches:

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Caesars have had at least 3 albums, although the previous ones were before they were forced to change their name from Caesars Palace.

Just saying :)