Do You Want To

"Do You Want To" is Franz Ferdinand grinning at their own success and slightly poisoning it. The riff is bigger and dumber than anything on the debut — a fat, glammy stomp with handclaps and a chorus built for arenas — and the production is noticeably beefier, more compressed, the sound of a band with a budget. Kapranos delivers the verses in an arch, gossipy sneer, narrating a scene at an art gallery opening: "well, look at all the people here tonight," name-dropping his own fame, "your famous friend, well, I blew him before you." The chorus is nothing but the title chanted over that riff, with the "lucky, lucky, you're so lucky" bridge dropping into a mock-tender falsetto. What saves it from being merely a swaggering single is the queasiness underneath — this is a song about the emptiness of scenester ambition, sung by someone who's obviously enjoying being at the center of it. The Glasgow art-scene specificity, the T. Rex boogie skeleton, the Bowie-esque camp all pull in the same direction. Best played loud at the start of a night out, when arrogance still feels like fun rather than a symptom. It's a victory lap that knows exactly how ridiculous victory laps are.