Franz Ferdinand Conquers College Street Music Hall

Outside, the air Tuesday night was thick with smoke from Canadian wildfires. Inside College Street Music Hall, the air was thick with smoke of a different kind, illuminated by bright lights and filled with the particular haze that comes from a crowd of people, jittery with excitement. 

They were gathered to see the Scottish rock band Franz Ferdinand, packed in shoulder to shoulder and trading water bottles and sips of beer. From teenagers to those who had been teenagers when the band formed, roughly 20 years ago, everybody was in high spirits and ready for the show.

Opening for Franz Ferdinand was the New Haven-based band The Fiction Kids, composed of Rama Kooks, Alexa Ambrose, and J Thomps. They played a rousing set consisting of songs like the snappy and invigorating ​“Heaven Knows,” which had the audience screaming along. ​“This is the time if you want to grab a drink,” announced Kooks, before launching into song. But by this time the audience was fully won over, and the crowd barely thinned. Nobody wanted to miss a single number.

Franz Ferdinand took the stage to thunderous applause. ​“It’s good to be back in CT again,” said Alex Kapranos, the lead singer and guitarist. He was joined by Bob Hardy (bass guitar, backing vocals), Julian Corrie also known as Miaoux Miaoux (keyboards, guitar, backing vocals), Dino Bardot (guitar, backing vocals), and Audrey Tait (drums). They played ​“Glimpse of Love,” a love letter to a girl both too good to be real and deliciously human. ​“Decadent, no she’s never been shy,” crooned Kapranos, and the crowd seemed to lose their own inhibitions as they jumped and waved their arms.

“I think that’s the first time we’ve played that here,” said Kapranos. ​“Now I’m going to play one we have played before here.” The opening notes of the light-hearted and invigorating ​“Do You Want To” rang through the theater, and the crowd erupted. Kapranos encouraged the audience to chant along in a chorus of ​“Lucky lucky, you’re so lucky.” They certainly seemed to feel so.

Kapranos was an engaging performer, strutting, prancing, and throwing himself around. He treated the stage like a battleground, one minute rearing up like a soldier, the next hunching over as if feigning being wounded. He commanded the audience like a puppeteer: when he pointed the mic at them, they sang along; when he called out for them to ​“go low,” they sank to their knees; and when he raised his arms above his head, a hundred hands brushed the air. Franz Ferdinand created an ocean of sound, carrying each attendee up and down with the waves.

Colors flashed blue, red, green, and pink across the stage. Cutting through it all were bars of white light, criss-crossing over and around the band to create an illusion of gates opening and closing, as if urging the audience to come closer, pulling them in.

The room exploded into a sea of bobbing heads and bouncing bodies when Franz Ferdinand played the cabaret-colorful and whirling number ​“The Dark of the Matinée.” Kapranos jumped and twirled like a toy soldier, raising his legs in near splits as he leaped into the air. ​“Find me and follow me through corridors, refectories and files / You must follow, leave this academic factory,” he sang, encouraging the audience to seek out their own dreams.

Kapranos, Hardy, Corrie, and Bardot lined up with their guitars and bass at the foot of the stage to perform the band’s arguably greatest hit, ​“Take Me Out.” The audience knew all the lyrics, screaming their enthusiasm. ​“I say, you don’t know / You say you don’t know,” sang the band, before pointing toward the crowd, who joined in for a spirited chorus of ​“Take me out!”

Towards the end of the set, Franz Ferdinand gave their drummer some time in the spotlight, bringing Tait down to the front while her band members accompanied her rhythm by pounding on the rest of the drum set in the background. The moment highlighted the fast-paced beats that are so essential to Franz Ferdinand’s enticing sound.

“So, you’re still here,” said Kapranos, following a brief pause to rearrange the drum set and re-tune the instruments. ​“I don’t want to be presumptuous, but if you’re still here, would you like to hear another song?”

The crowd roared its approval. Franz Ferdinand played ​“Michael” and then ​“This Fire,” the final song of the night. Kapranos and Bardot circled each other with their guitars like a pair of prowling lions, capturing the riotous feel of the anthem. ​“This fire is out of control, we gotta — ” called Kapranos, and the audience finished the line with gusto: ​“Burn this city!” 

“New Haven is out of control,” Kapranos continued, and it was, in the best way, with high spirits and blood-burning music.

At the end of the night, Kapranos raised his guitar above his head like a conquering hero. Franz Ferdinand’s performance at College Street Music Hall was a triumph well won.