EDMONTON - Rock 'n' roll is dead! Long live rock 'n' roll! People have been saying that - or at least thinking it - for generations.

Every time something new comes around, people say it again: out with the old! In with Franz Ferdinand!

Now some of you may be asking why a band named for a guy whose assassination started the First World War and sounds like T-Rex meets Gang of Four (the band, not the archduke) can be considered "new."

There is, however, abundant evidence: 4,500 young, hip, attractive Edmontonians packing the Shaw Conference Centre. They could've filled Rexall Place if there wasn't a hockey game last night.

Rock 'n' roll history has shown that new things are enthusiastically attended by young, hip, attractive people. It behooves us to pay attention. This was true of the Beatles, and to a much lesser though still significant extent, by Franz Ferdinand.

To hear a massive chant of "lucky, lucky, you're so lucky!" is to sense that you are indeed lucky to be in the vanguard of something new. And even though it borrows from the old, as all new things do, it will do nicely until something else new comes along. Behold the cycle of life!

Franz Ferdinand is notable for several reasons aside from the fact that they sound like T-Rex meets Gang of Four. Many of the band's songs sound like two different songs spliced together. At least two of the big hits performed last night - Do You Want To and Take Me Out - had that unusual trait. Seriously, two songs, two tempos, two chord structures - in one song! It's a bonus for fans.

Second, several of the band's songs deal with "doing" in one form or another, which is fun and sure beats not doing anything. Do You Want To clearly refers to having sex. Amiable frontman Alex Kapranos oozed his pungent Scottish sex appeal as he sang the key line, or rather key question, "Do you want to go where I never let you before?" And this after declaring he was going to "make somebody" love him. The nerve.

The band was soon to perform The Dark Of the Matinee, a song Kapranos said was about "choosing to do what you want" and with whom to do it with. Of course, whoever is doing what to whom in song is all in fun. Which brings us to the third point: The fun.

For all the '80s this band evokes, these lads have largely discarded the cold and the dark - hallmarks of some '80s "new wave" music - in favour of a bouncy disco-rock beat delivered in a headlong rush of enthusiasm that's impossible not to get caught up in.

There were a few warts - for character - but they only added to the fun, the humanity of it all. By the time Take Me Out rolled around - actually a song about dying, not doing - the crowd was in a lather, hopping and thinking en masse (though one can only guess at the thoughts), "We are in the presence of something new!"

We move now to co-headliner Death Cab for Cutie, from Seattle. Singer Ben Gibbard gave off the sort of sensitive new age vibe that, in the wrong crowd, would get his guitar smashed like the Juicy Fruit guy in the TV commercial. This of course was not the wrong crowd. The band's breezy yet melancholy brand of alternatively art-rocking pop music went over like gangbusters, especially among the girls.

On a stage dressed up in giant trees and cockeyed little houses, Death Cab opened with nothing more than five minutes of piano, Gibbard singing high like the long lost son of Supertramp about driving down "the darkest country road," inhaling the "strong scent of evergreen" while sitting in the passenger seat "as you're driving me home." Notice who's in the driver's seat here.

There were more cellphone cameras than raised Bic lighters, but the point was made - this is no ordinary rock band. It is, again, something new.

An eclectic, sometimes esoteric array of colours and moods followed. While Franz's songs sound like come-ons, Death Cab's songs sounds like conversations set to music - long talks between two philosophy students at that point in their courtship between drugs and sex.

The New Year seems like it took place during a long distance phone call, full of pining and loneliness. Soon came one we knew, Crooked Teeth, in which Gibbard observed, "You can't find nothing at all if there was nothing there all along." Makes you think.

Later came an even more familiar song, Soul Meets Body, one of several of the band's blissfully romantic songs with overtones of death. Soon thereafter, Gibbard kicked the band off stage and whipped out a lonely, folky ballad called I Will Follow You Into the Dark, and you get the general death idea.

The crowd was mesmerized by just his voice and acoustic guitar, then let loose the most tremendous cheer when the song was over. He must've hit a nerve.

That the biggest response of the night did not come from the announcement of the hockey score - though that was much appreciated - is proof that Death Cab fever was greater than Oiler fever, for at least a little while.

Good band, overall. Personally, I always wished the Juicy Fruit guy would retaliate by kicking his guitar-smashing critics right in the teeth.