Some Great Truth Or Not

Franz Ferdinand “Lucid Dreams”

One of the running themes in Franz Ferdinand’s music is an awareness that music and the social culture around it can provide an valuable escape from the more dreary aspects of life, and that framework gives us the raw materials to reinvent ourselves and reshape the narrative of our lives. In other words, the band have been making a case that hedonism and imagination are essential coping mechanisms for dealing with life, and ought to be embraced lest we give in to boredom and horror.

“Lucid Dreams” takes the band’s themes — both conceptual and musical — to the furthest extreme of their career to date. The lyrics express a desire not only to fully escape reality, but to reshape it within the mind to something more like a utopia. Of course, there is a catch: The escape is fleeting, and the alternate reality is constructed by a flawed mind, and so the limits of one’s own awareness and the depths of one’s neuroses are imposed on the supposedly perfect world.

In terms of the musical arrangement, the structure of the song is like a flowchart of the band’s development, starting with a charming power pop introduction before leaning into a more intense variation on their standard dance-rock template, and then concluding with an electronic acid climax and resolution that pushes them into an uncharted territory of their aesthetic. In context, the transition into the electronic section — which, I should mention is rather similar to the trick LCD Soundsystem pulled in “Yeah” — has a way of signaling a slip into another state of mind, as if casting off the vestiges of rock music has taken the music to a more “pure” place that mirrors the utopia in the singer’s mind.

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