In the summer of 2004 I was working in a greenhouse and there were two songs that, to me, forever changed the course of ‘indie rock’ – at least the kind that got played on the radio. One was a song about how a girl’s new boyfriend looked like a girlfriend the singer had the February previous. The other, of course, was “Take Me Out.”

This was a funny old place, this greenhouse. It was run by a guy who liked to act gruff and competent but was actually completely in thrall to the whims and commands of his mother, who really ran the place. The plant processing floor was run by a girl I’m pretty sure had never graduated high school and was named for a line in a Golden Earring song. The floor workers were a mix of college students like myself and old heads, like the guy who barely spoke English despite having been in the country for decades, and who had served in the Hungarian army during Soviet occupation (and had the greened-out stick-and-poke tattoo to prove it). The mother would walk the floor and make disparaging comments about everyone’s work habits (“Trevor, you don’t really know what you’re doing, do you?”) and generally get in people’s way. She insisted that everyone vote Conservative if we wanted to keep our jobs. I hope she’s dead. I really do.

Anyway, they kept the radio on and tuned to 97.7 (HITZ-FM), the Niagara hard rock station that broadcasted straight outta the White House of Rock in St. Catharines, Ontario. That summer one of the hottest songs was second single from Franz Ferdinand, “Take Me Out.” It’s a fascinating construction. It begins with what would, at that time, be a major indie rock single – So if you’re lonely, you know I’m here waiting for you. Then it slowed, incrementally, into a stomping riff inspired by the dance-punk stuff that had come out of Brooklyn the year before – liars, The Rapture, !!!, Radio 4. It’s an all-timer of a guitar riff, the kind that makes you want to pick up a guitar and start slicing into it. The song, then, is two great songs melded with skill into a single undeniable banger.

The rest of the album is pretty good, too. Although it’s not a single, the opener “Jacqueline” plays the same spliced-song greatness as “Take Me Out.” “This Fire” is a relentless heatseeking missile, and “The Dark Of The Matinee” is one of the decade’s best incitements to pogo. The whole thing is held together by the band’s smart, at times wordy and always glittering take on American dance-punk, which the British scene then took and ran. I guess Two Door Cinema Club comes out of this, doesn’t it? Maybe I should take all this back, then.

The band would score once more, with the follow up You Could Have It So Much Better. After that was a case of diminishing returns, one which they’ve never pulled out of. Sometimes bands come along and put out one perfect album and then chase it, never to attain it again. By the time “Michael” was released in August of 2004 I had moved to being a line cook at a T.G.I. Fridays near the falls and the soundtrack to that was various Psychopathic Records groups that the AKM was into; I earned his respect by knowing who Ill Bill was, having scrounged the name out of a Toronto zine I’d snagged a copy of at some point. Part of me, though, will always think of Franz Ferdinand as the soundtrack to arranging flowers and pruning dead leaves, though, working endlessly in the sweltering Niagara humidity for barely anything, that pumping guitar riff playing constantly.