A glow in the dark

HISTORIC old Liberty Hall has gone through lots of incarnations, from the site of an abolitionist newspaper in the 1850s to an opera house at the turn of the last century. On a recent night, the theater, now home to rock concerts, was a handy lab to test the staying power of Franz Ferdinand, the Scottish quartet that charmed the pop world last year with its combination of dance-happy grooves and wry, obsessive themes.

Sure, they were hailed by many critics as the “best new British rock band of 2004,” but 10 months into 2005 that doesn’t mean much -- unless you’ve got another knockout album to keep the momentum going. Too many “can’t miss” bands are falling by the wayside these days to think anything can be taken for granted. (What did happen to the Hives?)

It wouldn’t take long on this weeknight for the members of Franz Ferdinand to learn if they still had the touch, and even the group’s London-based manager was on hand to gauge the reaction to songs from the band’s new album, “You Could Have It So Much Better,” which comes out Tuesday.

The moment of truth came midway through the hour set with “Take Me Out,” a song from the first album that was so irresistible that it helped the CD, “Franz Ferdinand,” sell 3 million copies worldwide.

Typical of the Ferdinand mix of the sweet and bittersweet, the song is built around insanely catchy disco-punk grooves (think Pet Shop Boys meet the Buzzcocks). The story itself is far less cheery: A guy is so shattered by the breakup of a relationship that he begs his former dream girl to do him one last favor: Put him out of his misery. There’s no way he can go on living without her.

By the time lead singer Alex Kapranos reached the song’s chorus at Liberty Hall, the audience near the edge of the stage was bouncing like it was on a trampoline.

Which raised the question: How do you follow that?

Without stopping to catch a breath, Kapranos and the rest of the band launched their answer: “Do You Want To,” the equally exuberant single from the new album.

The song’s theme is at the opposite end of the pop spectrum from “Take Me Out,” at least outwardly. Here, the confident hero declares, “I’m going to make somebody love me,” and tells his elusive dream girl she’s the “lucky, lucky” one.

Of course, it’s also a fantasy, cloaking the insecurity and doubt of someone who has probably been anything but lucky in romance. But the guitar-driven music itself -- as chipper as the Beatles’ “She Loves You” -- feels so good that it’s easy to suspend disbelief and celebrate with him. The audience responds with another bouncing affirmation.

It’s this intriguing blend of darkness and bright pop glow -- intensity without the angst -- that makes Ferdinand such a fresh pop force. Departing from the torment and anger that dominated mainstream rock in the late ‘90s, Kapranos loves to dust off such forgotten pop devices as irony, wit and sophistication.

“People often don’t see beyond the initial euphoria of the music itself to see what is actually going on in the song,” he says, “but the story itself is essential to me. I want to write about the extremes that we feel in life, but not the extremes we could imagine people going through. I mean the extremes of situations I’ve been in or seen other people in -- the extremes of normal lives.”

He draws not only from other pop music genres, including hip-hop, but takes inspiration from challenging works in other art forms, whether it’s such disturbing psychological studies as the 1963 film “The Servant” or books by Graham Greene and George Orwell.

“The Beatles were huge for me,” says Kapranos, who notes that his Beatle-fan mom gave him the middle name Paul. “I used to jump around the room to the red album, the one with all the early hits on it. It made you feel euphoric. It was a sensation I couldn’t get from anything else, whether it was playing football, swimming or even seeing ‘Star Wars.’ ”

What especially intrigued Kapranos were songs, such as “Nowhere Man” and “I’m Down,” in which the music was melancholy or dark, but the record still felt uplifting.

“I have always been fascinated by the concept of the villain and the hero being in one person,” he said. “I love things like Blake’s reinterpretation of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’ the idea that Lucifer was the good guy because he was the rebel.”

Beatles? Blake? Milton? Lucifer?

No wonder Ferdinand’s music sounds so interesting.

An explorer blends in

kAPRANOS looks so much like a student as he peddles his bike along the downtown sidewalks in his preppy red shirt and black pants that no one appears to give him a second glance -- not even the couple entering Liberty Hall hoping to score tickets to the band’s performance that night.

Like the other members of the Scottish rock band, the skinny 33-year-old singer enjoys stepping away from the bus and hotel rooms to explore cities on the quartet’s new U.S. tour, which includes stops Friday and Saturday at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. Bikes have their own honored place, alongside the guitars and drum kit, in the band’s equipment trailer.

As Kapranos moves along Massachusetts Street, he stops occasionally to look into store windows or to chat with fans who do spot him. But it’s not all play. During the ride, he’s doing interviews on his cellphone to promote the new album. Today’s calls are from England, Israel and India.

The more time you spend with him, the more you realize there are two levels to his personality, just as there are to his music.

He’s so eager to pounce on every question that it seems as though he has thought about anything you could possibly ask him -- not just about his music, but the history and state of rock.

It’s the same kind of intensity that marks another smart, skinny, fair-haired Brit: Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. But Kapranos wants mainstream acceptance where Yorke has sometimes gone to painful lengths to avoid it.

Kapranos, however, admits he was once wary of the spotlight.

“When I first started playing in live groups in Glasgow, I wanted to stay on the outside,” he says, sitting in a park after finishing his bicycle run for the day. “I had no interest in the pop charts or record companies.

“Part of it was a willful contrariness, but part of it was also fear -- a fear of taking on that huge pop machine and fear of being seen as uncool. Are you good enough? Are you strong enough?”

It wasn’t until he started Franz Ferdinand three years ago that the onetime college divinity student shed his fears. “The turning point was realizing you could take on the challenge of the pop world without betraying your principles,” he continues. “I looked at my musical idols, whether it was the Beatles or the Clash or whoever, and saw that they were able to make music that was unique and yet still compete in the real world by making pop music.”

Franz Ferdinand joins a long line of Scottish rockers, including Simple Minds, Annie Lennox and the brothers Jim and William Reid, but Kapranos was actually born in a small town near Bristol, England, where his father taught law at a college and his mother was a housewife.

The family (which would later include two more children) moved to Edinburgh when Alex was 7, and in Scotland, Kapranos didn’t fit in. Not only did the kids think he had a funny accent, but he was pushed ahead a year in school, which meant he was the smallest and youngest in his class. And there was the Greek last name.

“For years, I felt miserable about being an outsider, but then I suddenly embraced it,” Kapranos says over dinner before the concert. “I saw the value of being an outsider. It was liberating. You didn’t have to worry about trying to fit in or losing your insider status. It also encouraged you to challenge and provoke the status quo.”

Kapranos salutes that role on “Outsiders,” a standout tune on the new album. The song’s opening line is even, in part, a message to fans who wonder if success will lead to compromises in the band’s music: “We’ve seen some changes/ But we’re still outsiders.”

Kapranos started writing songs as soon as he entered his teens. His family had moved to Glasgow by then, and he met other kids who shared his love of music. One of his early bandmates, Glen Thomson, is now the band’s tour manager.

“You could always see that Alex was going to be in music,” Thomson says, standing outside Liberty Hall as fans file into the building. “He never understands that question, ‘What would you be if you weren’t a musician?’ ”

Kapranos, who was earlier in and out of such bands as Yummy Fur and the Karelia, picked the other members of Franz Ferdinand as much for compatibility as for musicianship. Bob Hardy, 25, hadn’t played bass before he joined the group, while Nick McCarthy, 30, and Paul Thomson, also 30, started out in Franz as drummer and guitarist, respectively, before switching roles. (The name Franz Ferdinand came from the Austrian archduke whose assassination helped trigger World War I.)

To see Ferdinand on stage, however, you’d think they were all longtime masters of their instruments. They play with sometimes breathtaking precision, and there’s a lot of hard work behind those razor-sharp arrangements. At the sound check, the band spent nearly 20 minutes just perfecting a 15-second segment of a new song.

“No, no,” Kapranos says gently to the band, trying to get them to come together on a note at the same instant.

When they miss even slightly, he says a few words to each musician before starting again. It’s never criticism, only encouragement. And the sense of community he creates is evident in the shows themselves, reaching out to the audience with a warmth that is all too rare among hot young rock bands.

After creating a buzz in England on tiny Domino Records, Franz Ferdinand was picked up in the U.S. last year by powerhouse Epic, and the group wowed audiences here in a series of club shows. Its success, in turn, helped open mainstream pop-rock radio playlists for such other melody-rich pop-rock outfits as the Killers.

The group was on such a roll, in fact, that many rock observers were surprised it went to work in February to record a second album instead of simply promoting the first CD for several more months. Band members had been writing new songs during those sound checks on the road, so they felt confident they had strong new material.

The upcoming album proves the band was right.

Psychedelia and punk

ON the new CD, Kapranos and songwriting partner McCarthy touch on emotional extremes in song after song, tracing how feelings can twist thoughts in sometimes torturous ways.

In “Walk Away,” a midtempo number that will likely be the second single from the album, the hero tries to be brave in the face of pending rejection. He tells the woman about to leave him: “I love the sound of you walking away.”

There’s also a haunting yet invigorating mixture of psychedelia and punk in “The Fallen,” the album’s most daring departure. It’s a song, based on some characters that Kapranos knew in Glasgow, that touches on spirituality, self-destruction and politics.

The group also moves successfully into ballads, with the piano-driven “Eleanor Put Your Boots On” coming so close to early Paul McCartney turf that some might think the title is a homage to “Eleanor Rigby.” In fact, the title refers to Kapranos’ girlfriend, Fiery Furnaces singer Eleanor Friedberger.

Despite the album’s imagination and zest, there’s no guarantee radio will again be receptive to Franz Ferdinand’s music, especially mainstream radio, which leans to hip-hop and teen pop. But on this third stop on the tour, Kapranos was delighted with the response to the new songs, including “Outsiders,” which was saved for the encore.

“It’s easy to get discouraged sometimes when you listen to American rock radio because everything is so bland, so self-referential,” Kapranos says at the restaurant. “Obviously there are exceptions, but most bands stay within such boring boundaries. They don’t pay attention to what’s happening in hip-hop or other fields. It’s like the stations are playing the same record 24 hours a day.

“But I’ve heard so many great bands from America over the years that I know there’s an audience for something else, and that’s what we feel at the shows -- a hunger for that.”

Robert Hilburn, pop music critic of The Times, can be reached at calendar .letters@latimes.com

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Album rating

Franz Ferdinand

“You Could Have It So Much Better” (Domino/Epic)

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