That's how Kevin and I ended up motoring up the I-15 through Barstow, California, toward the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains, listening to records by the Killers and Scissor Sisters, two bands that I had thus far tried to avoid, because the Killers and Scissor Sisters are fashion bands, and I generally hate fashion bands. But the last few weeks of listening to these records -- as well as attending Franz Ferdinand's recent show in San Francisco and devouring my review copy of the latest from Interpol, whose suit-wearing tendencies helped kick off this whole nouveau fashion-rock thing -- have got me reconsidering my attitude.
Music that you listen to on a road trip tends to leave a lasting impression. Inevitably, after about two hours of driving, when it's pitch black outside and you've run out of things to say, you and your buddy just sit there, listening, staring into the night. It was under these circumstances that we put on the latest from Las Vegas's hot-rock phenoms, the Killers. The first five songs on Hot Fuss -- especially "Jenny Was a Friend of Mine" and the ubiquitous single "Somebody Told Me" -- are clean, catchy new-wave bliss, the keyboards shrieking out amid charging guitars and pogoing bass lines, all of it arranged around driving choruses; the Killers may be ripping off the Cure, Blondie and half a dozen other '80s hit-makers, but when their shtick works, it works. When it doesn't -- and it definitely doesn't on the entire second half of the record -- it sounds like paint-by-numbers pop pabulum designed by the A&R division of NASA.
Then there are the Scissor Sisters from New York. Here's an act that's so self-consciously gay/cool it makes Avril Lavigne look legitimately punk. Featuring band members with names like Jake Shears, Ana Matronic and Babydaddy, the Scissor Sisters look like they raided Hedwig's closet and play disco-tinged rock inspired by the likes of Elton John, the Bee Gees and David Bowie. Like the Killers, everything about the band seems calculated to the point of being offensive, which doesn't mean the songs suck -- far from it, in fact. Tunes like "Take Your Mama" and "Laura" are irresistible. It's just that enjoying them leaves me with the same bad taste in my mouth as eating an entire bowl of brownie mix.
Still, as we drove, Kevin and I found ourselves bouncing and grooving, nodding our heads and singing along, both on the way up the mountain and three days later when we drove the six hours back home. The experience raised a question for me about what's going on with alternative music: What's it going to mean to the current alt-rock moment to have such obviously calculating groups crash the party? The Killers and Scissor Sisters are among the handful of "it" bands defining the sound of 2004; the third new act in this trio of cool is Franz Ferdinand, and it was with the above question in mind that I attended that band's show at the Concourse Pavilion at S.F. Design Center.
If there was any doubt that Franz Ferdinand is the reigning champ of fashionable, hook-heavy dance rock, it was laid to rest at that show. The Concourse is airplane-hangar huge, and it was nearly packed to the gills with 16- to 24-year-olds dressed to the nines. Guys with two-hours-to-get-it-this-messy hair, wearing tight jeans and tighter T-shirts, mingled with attractive girls with hoop earrings dangling from their ears and hot-pink blouses hanging off one shoulder, Molly Ringwald-style. It was Sixteen Candles all over again.
When Franz Ferdinand took the stage -- with three of its four members wearing shirts and ties -- the crowd was pretty drunk (okay, I was pretty drunk) and followed the band through every rhythmic twist and turn. The air was filled with beach balls and the sounds of screaming fans, with dirty guitars and Alex Kapranos's sneering vocals, with hand-claps and the occasional keyboard, and lots of urgent, careening drumming. The songs flew by, the band having sped them all up, intentionally perhaps, or merely as an unconscious response to the giddy, impatient energy of the venue, which, when FF played its ubiquitous single "Take Me Out," exploded like a henhouse full of chickens into which someone had dropped a fox.
