WHAT THE POP PAPERS SAY: Franz Ferdinand special

You can't have failed to spot that Franz Ferdinand have a new record out, as there's scarcely a publication or TV programme around which hasn't boasted a front page feature on the band. Nobody, yet, though has asked them how come their video for the current single - of clearly nice young men pretending to be uppity and disrupting an opening at an art gallery - has an identical set-up to the one for Will Young's Leave Right Now.

In the Guardian Weekend magazine, Robert Hardy and Alex Kapranos do their best to make their world seem downbeat: "Hardy describes how being in Franz Ferdinand is 'just what I did after leaving art school... it's our job' [...] Kapranos concurs. 'A lot of being creative means going and doing it, putting in eight hours a day'." Perhaps now the Gate Gourmet dispute has been settled, the TUC should be thinking about helping the boys out with terms and conditions.

You wouldn't expect Scotland on Sunday to be looking for the holes in the album, drawing attention to the flaws of the local heroes, and indeed, you get the impression that even if Franz had feet of purest red clay, SonS would be thrilled by their cunning decision to go beyond mere plasticine tootsies: "On balance, it should prove itself to be an even better record, also contemptuously surpassing the efforts of those who have followed in their elegant wake. If the Franz formula was a success through accident rather than design, the band now delight in reconstituting the component parts of insistent hooks and angular guitars to even more compelling effect." Plus, they're like lions in bed.

Over at the Telegraph, close personal friend of Bono Neil McCormick is even more excited: "It puts me in mind of a 21st-century version of the savage young Beatles, albeit playing a Cossack knees-up at a Glaswegian wedding while singing about the death of God." We're just glad it took his mind off all those strangers trying to kill him for a few minutes.

If everyone in Britain is quivering with excitement, it's slightly less muted overseas. The New York Post's three star rating on the review won't hurt half as much as the description of the band as "Scotland's answer to New York's Strokes." You might as well just ride a bicycle up and down Clydeside bellowing 'can't top your debut, no matter how you try.'

The St Petersburg Times gets a bit more excited - "another suave series of stylized rockers, complete with libidinous and danceable grooves, lots of darting electric guitar and synth and, of course, heaps of provocations." Yes, pile those provocations high.

Okay, maybe not everyone in Britain has lost control of their creative sphincters - The Independent's Andy Gill suggests that, actually, the Franz boys aren't as good as... well, the Kaiser Chiefs: " there's an appealing good humour about the Chiefs' songs that reinforces, rather than rejects, the warmth of human connection. And, more important, there are more great hooks in the average KC track than in the whole of this album. So, yes, we could indeed have it so much better." While it's always nice to see a critic prepared to stand up and take a view against the prevailing norm, that's no excuse to be silly.

Over in the NME, who have marked the return of the Frannies with, erm, The Strokes on the cover, Alex Needham does the review. (Interestingly, he suggests that the decision to give the album a name was the result of a sudden commercial judgement, which we also thought at first: Mitch, from the band's marketing team told us it was actually the band's decision.) Needham lists the drug references, gives it nine, but there's still the pain of the unthinking comparison here, too: "The first bars of The Fallen could almost be Kasabian." Ouch.

Elsewhere in this week's NME, then: there's a photo of the Kaiser Chiefs being ritually humiliated (they turned up at a radio station expecting to play to the audience; instead they were made to do a song for five employees of the station, to see if they were up to speed. You somehow feels Franz Ferdinand wouldn't do that.

News tracks round behind Babyshambles. Of course - and nobody really wants to admit this - but the main interest in a Babyshambles gig now is the same as it was in Primal Scream around 1992, or Formula 1 racing all the time, or Noel Edmond's Late Late Breakfast Show. There might be some other entertainment, but everyone's secretly hoping they'll see a man die.

Also in news, Blur announce their intention to return sounding like a stupid punk rock band - because it has to be made to fit to the limitations of Damon Albarn's guitar skills.

Peter Robinson slams down Gene Simmons, and Gene reveals himself to be hugely obsessed about gay public school boys, gay marines, Boy George. Then he quotes - approvingly - Thatcher's little dictum about how money isn't the root of all evil, but the lack of money. If you're poor, thinks Gene, you should go out and get a job. It's that simple. He doesn't, unfortunately, find time to explain how it is that people can be in work and still live in grinding poverty, but we're sure he's got a little Thatcher quotey-quotey for that, too.

Radar goes to the CMJ and all they bring back are Gogol Bordello; who are the Scissor Sisters redux, it looks like.

The new Strokes album sounds nothing like the last two Strokes albums, or so they tell us: "'we decided to try out a medley of different things' explains Julian... 'we listened to the first two albums and we didn't want to hear our songs like that anymore,' Nick explains." This might have been more convincing if it had come before their new stuff leaked online and we could all hear that it was like their first two albums, with someone playing Lunar Jetman over the top.

It's interesting that in an issue where Gene Simmons, twenty-five years on, still is unable to get past the thought that Boy George liked boys, that in the course of his Antony and the Jonsons piece Rob Fitzpatrick suggests that Boy George's talent meant his sexuality was "all but ignored" - we're not so sure; we don't think that 80s Britain didn't pay any attention to the fact that O'Dowd was fond of cock, it just demonstrated that it didn't matter to them as much as a few tabloid editors, churchmen and right wing politicians hoped. In this week's Guardian Review, Alan Bennett makes the same point about interest in his own sexuality: "Papers like the Mail make out that people are prurient and outraged; i don't think people really care."

The archive is raided for a retelling of the time Radiohead killed off Creep - it's nicely done, but older readers might feel the real lump in their throat at the ragout of the original two-page feature: all those words!

reviews
albums
louis xiv - secrets are kept - "they were dull Britrock apers Convoy", 7
HIM - dark light - "the word is wimpy", 4
the fall - fall heads roll - "settled, stable, and plain rocking", 8

tracks
totw - we are scientists - the great escape - "more agitated than bloc party"
the cardigans - i need some fine wine and you, you need to be nicer - "makes you go more than a little bit moist"

live
hard-fi, kings cross scala - "Richard has become a Smash Hits pin-up"
art brut - atomic cafe, munich - "a girl in tiny hot pants leaps out of the audience, falls at Eddie's feet, and screams 'take your pants off'"
the lemonheads - "Dando makes an exceptional case that he should be remembered as fondly as Cobain"

And, finally, back to Franz Ferdinand. Their hopes are not the only ones riding on the release of the new album - as the Liverpool Echo reported this week, HMV are rather hoping it sells in large numbers, too. Facing like-for-like sales slumping in this sludgy market, the music and books retailer is placing its hope in the new Jamie Oliver cookbook, the new Robbie Album; and You Could Have It So Much Better. It's not just their own honour they're fighting for; they're battling to save the British high street as we know it.

music franz ferdinand alex kapranos the strokes gene simmons margaret thatcher alan bennett boy george hmv radiohead