The disco-punk bandwagon might have long since left town, but Tonight:Franz Ferdinand suggests Glasgow’s arch dukes of art-pop aren’t going to let a little thing like a shifting zeitgeist put them off their principle aim of writing music to make girls dance. Whereas its predecessor, 2005’s You Could Have It So Much Better, felt a little rushed in the execution, Franz’s third album feels stronger for its two years of gestation. Employing a slightly more rigid, synthetic feel than its predecessors, these twelve tracks mix up sing-along pop moments and loping grooves with sundry left turns, meeting expectations, then confounding them with a showy flourish. “Ulysses” is clip-cloppy funk that builds to a huge chorus with a long slide of squelchy synthesiser, while “Lucid Dreams” dispenses with guitars entirely at the four-minute point, morphing into Fischerspooner-style techno. Meanwhile, your host, Alex Kapranos, remains just on the charming side of sleazy, crooning “Kiss me/Kiss me where your eye won’t meet me” (“Turn It On”), or on the Beatles-esque “Twilight Omens”, trying to laugh you into the sack: “I typed your number into my calculator/ Where it spelt a dirty word, when you turned it upside down…” Tonight might be a little too erratic to reignite Franzmania, but it strikes a neat balance between consolidation and reinvention. –-Louis Pattison (amazon.co.uk)