The 2025 Poco's Legacy Award Nominees: Franz Ferdinand

Do you kids know about Poco? I barely do, but from what I gather, Poco started as Richie Furay’s new band after Buffalo Springfield split, Stephen Stills and Neil Young departing to become Stills & Young. Furay's contract was actually traded to Epic Records by Atlantic in exchange for Graham Nash's, in case you didn’t realize how professional the rock industry was about supergroups even then. Though Poco's first album, Pickin' Up The Pieces, was hailed as a country-rock breakthrough (five stars from The Rolling Stone Album Guide!), members consistently got more famous after leaving the group: Jim Messina with Loggins & Messina, Randy Meisner with The Eagles, Timothy B. Schmit with The Eagles, Furay with the Souther-Furay-Hillman Band. All were acts that went gold before Poco. 

Though singer/steel guitarist Rusty Young was the only original member left, Poco finally went gold in 1978 with their eleventh album, Legend, thanks to a Top 20 hit (and Adult Contemporary #1) named “Crazy Love.” (Phil Hartman designed the cover!) The band kept on keeping on until being dropped by their third label, Atlantic, in the mid-80s. It looked over, until Richard Marx & his manager got the original line-up together for 1989’s Legacy, the band’s seventeenth studio album. Messina! Furay! Meisner! Grantham! Ok, that last guy, the drummer, was replaced by session dudes on the album. But still! Despite the returning ringers, it was Rusty Young who sang the big hit, “Call It Love,” which wasn’t written by Richard Marx, but easily could have been. The album went gold (their second!), but RCA soon dropped them anyway when the '90s happened. Poco became Young’s project again, mostly touring and not releasing another album until the ‘00s. (Meanwhile, Rolling Stone's 1992 album guide demoted Pickin' Up The Pieces to three stars, the '03 edition excising them entirely.)

So why am I detailing this boomer rock footnote under a picture of Franz Ferdinand? Well, for one, I think it’s hilarious that an act with one gold album after twenty years named a release Legacy. Granted, bands sticking it out for 20 years is a lot less novel in 2025 than 1989. Today, 20th anniversaries are cause for deluxe reissues, online oral histories and “plays The Hit Album” tours, rather than proof of your current glory, or cause for a commercial comeback. Especially if you were never that big a commercial deal anyway. 

So, to contextualize the accomplishment of making a new album 20 years after your first, I’ve created The Poco’s Legacy Award, which will celebrate bands who have newly achieved this position in their career. Poco might be an obscure reference to make, as only people in their mid-40s or older might even go “oh yeah, that song” if they heard “Call It Love” or "Crazy Love" at a CVS. But I keep being told most people under 40 prefer not to read anyway, and I assume those that do will appreciate the delightful Dennis Millerness of this effort. I know Miller isn’t associated with wry, arcane namechecks as much as pathetic right-wing pandering now. Nonetheless, that’s what I mean. (And this is the last time I’ll reference an ‘80s SNL cast member.)

Without further ado, please consider the first Poco’s Legacy Award nominee of the 2025…Franz Ferdinand!

I’m tempted to say these Scots might be the most disappointing band of what I called the “nu-wave” era and people now call “indie sleaze.” Ironically, in the hopped up, newly bloggable days of the early ‘00s, I was thrilled at the idea of hip, glamorous acts putting out one or two good, popular albums before suddenly sucking wind on their way to state fairs. Like Flock Of Seagulls! ABC! The Knack! Et cetera! Pop trash from cool kids! Eventually, I was annoyed aughts rockers didn’t have the commercial courage to really go for it, settling for an album every three years and a niche festival audience, rather than having number one singles and then exploding like Blondie or The Clash.

But today, a middle-aged guy myself…I get it. The Strokes probably wouldn’t be together if they’d signed on with the modern equivalent of Mutt Lange for a Heartbeat City. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs may never have become Blondie big, but I’m glad they post happy pictures of each other on Instagram rather than bicker with contempt at Hall of Fame inductions. The Killers committed to incoherent romantic rock bombast, where Bruce Springsteen is Meat Loaf is Rick Springfield is “Bette Davis Eyes,” and goddamn if they don’t have a herd of millennials swooning along. These bands chose to live saner, safer lives than their new wave predecessors, and it would be heartless of me to grumble about how it affected the jukebox.

While Franz Ferdinand has had a similar commercial trajectory as their ‘00s peers, their creative trajectory is far more like a flash-in-the-pan ‘80s band. Franz Ferdinand, the band’s 2004 debut, is up there with The Ramones and Van Halen and The Cars as a miracle of self-titled certitude, springing fully-formed from the head of rock glory. A half-minute of a capella narrative is dramatically followed by cheers of “we only work when we need the money!” and skittering, post-punk clangor. Song after song about hunting (“Take Me Out”), charades (“Darts Of Pleasure”) and ever so many delightful romantic misunderstandings (“Cheating on You”) follows. On “The Dark Of Matinee,” bandleader Alex Kapranos celebrates learning the dance of flirtation as a teenager, a journey climaxing not with endless ass or assumptions of platinum, but being interviewed by Terry Wogan. Lest that sound too refined, "This Fire" is just a pure, unapologetic party-starter.

“Michael” was the definitive song of the “metrosexual” moment, and separated Franz‘s foxiness from the rest of the nu-wave pack. Shouting “nothing matters now!” in erotic abandon at another man’s allure, Kapranos was more unabashed about physical details than he ever is with women, because with “Michael” it’s just shits and giggles. This isn’t the vulnerability and risk taken by androgynous predecessors like Suede and Placebo, but a fun night out where homophobia is stupid. It’s up to you whether that’s insulting or endearing, but the track’s buoyancy pleads for you to lean towards the latter.

The album ends with Kapranos forty feet above the water, debating whether to make the pop plunge. The bashed out ’05 follow-up, named You Could Have It So Much Better (though initially intended to be a second self-titled release), plays it both ways. The first single, “Do You Want To,” ratchets up the camp danceability, winking about arty friends and m2m blowjobs while musically splitting the difference between Gang Of Four and KC & The Sunshine Band. Songs like “This Boy” and “Evil & A Heathen” affirm their raucous gifts, but every song that departs from frantic high kicks and “Hey! Who wants to make out?” is at best a generic Britpop pastiche. Still, if they’re canny enough to know you shouldn’t overthink the sophomore release, they know it’s album number three that’s make or break, right?

Kapranos & company sure did, planning to record the next one with Girls Aloud/S Club 7 UK chart hand Brian Higgins, a move that was very Parallel Lines. Then the band decided they weren’t pop product after all, scuttling the sessions. Tonight finally dropped in early 2009, led by a song that went “you’re not Ulysses!” and did not go pop. “No You Girls” has pushed slightly above “Do You Want To” to become the band’s second biggest song on streaming after “Take Me Out,” but I’ve always found it a banal capitulation to heterosexuality. And if I wanted standoffish, proudly straight dudes over jagged guitars and ok dance beats, I’d listen to the Arctic Monkeys. Which is what a lot of Franz’s audience was doing at the time.

The rest of Tonight, and all of 2013’s Right Words, Right Thoughts, Right Action was more familiar froth about…who the fuck could tell or care? “Sweet love illumination, sweet sweet love, celebration/ cop car burn, reason turn/ but it’ll bring you up, you’ll be alright.” And that’s the chorus from the “hit.” Perhaps realizing they could use some conceptual help, the band backed Sparks for an album, cheekily named FFS. Sparks, in case you don’t know, is a duo that will never run out of jokes and catchphrases (and sadly, for me, indulgent song structures and falsetto) despite making the scene thirty years before Franz Ferdinand.

2018’s Always Ascending shows a modicum of Sparks’ influence, with indulgent song structures and more straightforward song titles (“Huck and Jim” and “The Academy Award,” rather than “Love Illumination” and “Treason! Animals”). But the band is still stuck with a sound and persona they can’t evolve so much as diffuse and obscure. Original guitarist Nick McCarthy amicably left to do something else with his life before the album’s recording, original drummer Paul Thomson amicably left to do likewise afterwards. Both have been amicably replaced by others from the Scottish music scene, a keyboardist joining amicably circa Ascending. The 2022 compilation Hits To The Head manages to fit 20 songs into a 69 minute CD, which is arguably nice. But if you start the chronological tracklisting at track 6 (“Do You Want To”), you might wonder why there’s another 14.

Nearly seven (seven!) years after Ascending, Franz Ferdinand is back with The Human Fear. Opener “Audacious” follows a brisk verse with a grand, McCartney-esque chorus (“Don’t stop feeling audacious/ there’s no one to save us/ so just carry on”). Perhaps unable to commit to the familiar rock idea that keeping on keeping on is amazing, the song suddenly stops mid-line, replaced by a disco number about being an “Everydaydreamer” (“I’m looking at a window in a wall” - sexy!). “Hooked” recalls the Dandy Warhols’ ironic synth-phase, and might be the catchiest thing here. “Night Or Day” pledges monogamous devotion over the “Take Me Out” beat, the word “or” meaning “and” in an attempt to avoid obvious cliche. The band having a keyboardist now means every song has keys laid over it. Track 9 has a polka beat. The last song compares your acceptance of Kapranos’ flaws to pigeons. Pigeons don’t care, you see. And neither do people who make it to the last song of Franz Ferdinand’s latest album. 

Though they haven’t seen the Hot 100 of any country’s singles chart in over a decade, every Franz Ferdinand album has charted in the UK Top 10 (and the Scottish Top 3!). So the odds are good a more conceptually or commercially noteworthy album will qualify for the Poco’s Legacy Award before the end of the year (I’m looking at you, James Murphy!). But even if Franz Ferdinand is a now-negligible act benefiting from one hell of a debut and the cultural inertia of the commercial rock market…they’ve been in the game for twenty years now. And that earns them a nomination. 

Franz Ferdinand is at 270 on my Top 300 Albums of All Time. I'm telling you this because I've found people are more inclined to discuss and share reviews if there's a quantitative element at the top or bottom they can easily debate. Prove me right!

If you want to tell me what I've missed about Poco or Franz Ferdinand, please say it to a mirror three times first. If you still demand satisfaction, contact me at anthonyisright at gmail dot com. Skip the mirror step if you have more interesting thoughts to share or want to make sure I know about another potential Poco's Legacy Award nominee dropping an album this year.