January is rock and pop's own equivalent of the silly season. Cast into penury by Christmas excess, the general public stays away from record shops; the singles chart becomes the playground of the obsessive fan and the oddball. This year is no exception. Michelle appears to be at number one largely because people feel sorry for her, not because her single is any good. Bo Selecta's Proper CrimBo, meanwhile, is at number 42, which means that a large number of people are going out and buying a Christmas novelty record in the middle of January. Who are these people? Why are they still at large in society?
Under the circumstances, it would be easy to dismiss the sudden rise of Franz Ferdinand, the Glasgow quartet whose second single, Take Me Out, crashed into the top three last week. However, you have to hope its success represents something more than a seasonal quirk, because Take Me Out is audibly the best single by a British guitar band in years. It starts unpromisingly, as standard post-Strokes indie rock: agitated guitars and languorous crooning. After one verse, however, it dramatically shifts gear, unexpectedly slowing down, introducing a louche funk beat, a fantastic chorus and a guitar riff memorable not because it reminds you of something else but because it sounds entirely unlike anything else. Its weird structure smacks ofbeguiling self-belief. This is what you've been listening to recently, it seems to be saying: well, this is what we can do.
Certainly, Franz Ferdinand have little in common with the deeply prosaic post-Britpop alt-rock landscape of Coldplay and the Stereophonics, where anything too clever is treated with a sort of pathological suspicion. Behind the weird name lies a clear interest in the arty Scots post-punk bands of the early 1980s, such as Orange Juice and Joseph K. At a time when most groups seem to have bought their image off the peg in the Gap sale, Franz Ferdinand also look thrillingly odd, a situation compounded by drummer Paul Thompson's recent decision to grow a rather questionable pencil moustache.
On the evidence of their eponymous debut album, they don't even have much in common with others in the new wave of bands influenced by post-punk guitar. Prior to their arrival, this movement's leading lights were New York's the Rapture. Their debut album, Echoes, had plenty of vigorous, angular guitars but nothing in the way of a tune and rather too much in the way of a vocalist wailing away like the Cure's Robert Smith suffering a vicious attack of irritable bowel syndrome. By contrast, Franz Ferdinand's album arrives packed not just with fizzing guitars, disco-influenced drums and intriguing shifts in tempo, but also memorable songs, laden with hooklines and startling riffs. The opener, Jacqueline gathers speed as it goes, building from a sweet acoustic introduction to a thunderous chorus. Darts of Pleasure has a lovely vocal melody, floating wistfully above the scratching guitars, and a remarkable finale: a clatter of military drums, a wall of guitar noise and a sort of deranged German terrace chant. It's simultaneously bewildering and thrilling.
Meanwhile, the lyrics are never less than fascinating. If the Stereophonics wrote a song about failing to get off with someone at a party, it seems fairly likely they would call it I Failed to get off with Someone at a Party. Take Me Out, however, creates something approaching high drama out of the situation, imagining its lovelorn protagonists as snipers. Matinee depicts furtive sexual goings-on in an arthouse cinema, while Michael appears to be a love song aimed squarely at a man. This really shouldn't seem like a brave move in 2004, but it does. Morrissey and the Magnetic Fields aside, indie doesn't really do gay. On the rare occasions that an alt-rock artist dabbles with sexual ambiguity in their lyrics, they either start carrying on as if they personally invented the concept of homosexuality and deserve some sort of medal - see electro-rapper Peaches - or else, like Suede, they overdo the mincing and end up sounding ridiculous, like John Inman visiting an indie disco. Michael does neither, settling for an intriguing combination of sly humour and bug-eyed lust, as if the song's central character started camping it up for a laugh and ended up in rather deeper water than he had anticipated.
You simply don't get songs like Michael very often in current rock music. It's symptomatic of the originality that makes Franz Ferdinand so intriguing. Their debut album pulls off a fine balancing act: clever without sounding pretentious, idiosyncratic but easy to get along with, a shift away from post-Britpop traditionalism that still recognises the importance of writing great pop songs. You can only hope their success continues long after the madness of the January charts has subsided. Listening to their debut album, that seems a fairly safe bet.