FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE

Fountains of Wayne deliver another perfect power-pop gem

By The Burg Staff on Aug. 03, 2011

BY MATT ASHARE

STACY'S MEN: Power-pop hooks + Brill Building Songsmanship = Fountains of Wayne

Smart, sharply written power-pop bands — from the Hollies, the Raspberries, and up through Cheap Trick and the Cars — have, at least since the heyday of Buddy Holly and the Beatles, had a place in the realm of rock. There’s just something timeless about marrying a catchy chorus to a well-honed hook, throwing just the right amount of muscle behind a memorable melody, and letting it rip. Unfortunately, the structures of power-pop don’t often allow for much wiggle room: there’s a formula to it, and it’s often difficult for even the best power-pop songs not to come off as, well, a tad formulaic — as mere novelties stripped of rock’s presumed weightiness.
     Singer/guitarist Chris Collingwood and bassist Adam Schlesinger are consummate songwriters who have been practicing the art of power-pop in the NYC-based band Fountains of Wayne since 1996. They’re more referential than reverential in their approach, which is to say that as often as you might catch echoes of the past in their tightly constructed compositions, they never descend to mere parroting or, for that matter, parody. Their biggest hit to date, 2003’s “Stacy’s Mom," is littered with musical nods in the general direction of the Cars — from the “Just What I Need” guitar figure that kicks off the first verse, to the vintage synths that run through the chorus, to the “Best Friend’s Girl” handclaps that emerge at the end. But the innocent exuberance of the song, an ode to a dude who falls in lust with his girlfriend’s mom, is pure FoW fun.
     For a band this immediately accessible — a band who have generally scored well with critics — FoW have found commercial success remarkably elusive. They’ve often been mentioned in the same breath as Weezer, but unlike Rivers Cuomo’s West-Coast weirdo, geek-boy charisma, Collingwood and Schlesinger are a team who tend to something more along the lines of the nostalgic charm of buttoned-down Brill Building songsmanship.
“I-95’“ the yearningly lovelorn single from their fourth album, 2007’s Traffic and Weather, is less about the object of the singer’s affections than about the amusing knick-knacks one finds at a typical rest stop along the highway that runs up and down the East Coast: “They’ve got most of the ‘Barney’ DVDs/Coffee mugs and tees that say ‘Virginia is for Lovers’.“ The plaintive yet playful “Michael and Heather At the Baggage Claim” is a bit like a “Seinfeld” script set to music: nothing really happens, but that’s the point.

Fountains of Wayne, Sky Full of Holes (Yep-Roc)

Perhaps what works in a sitcom doesn’t translate to a pop song. Or maybe Collingwood and Schlesinger just have a different audience in mind. Either way, it would be hard to find fault with anything on Sky Full of Holes, the new FoW disc, which brings the band (including longtime guitarist and drummer Jody Porter and Brian Young) to the Birchmere in Alexandria for a two-night stand, Aug. 7 and 8. The first single, “A Dip in the Ocean," is a breezy, driving-with-the-windows-down summer cooler replete with bubbly melodies that, in typical FoW fashion, belie the narrator’s reticence about a beach holiday misadventure (“Are we bored in this place/I’m assured the procedure is painless”). “The Summer Place” uses a similar strategy, framing the story of family dysfunction with upbeat acoustic guitars, a sing-along chorus, and a pretty harpsichord bridge that has Collingwood crooning, “At 15/shoplifting/Was the only game she liked to play/At 40/She’s so bored/She thinks about it/Then decides to pay."
     Simple fun in the sun has never been this band’s cup of tea. But poignant character sketches are right up their alley. The country-tinged “Workingman’s Hands” brings to mind a wistful Glen Campbell with its touchingly vivid portrait of blue-collar life and Collingwood intoning, “Oh you save your money for a hole in the ground, a black car, and a long wall of roses." And in “Action Hero,“ fingerpicked acoustic guitar gets support from surging powerchords as a husband with a wife and three kids deals with the little messes of life and the bigger concern of his looming mortality.
    Collingwood also does confessional quite well, subverting the cliché of the life-on-the-road song with, yes, “Road Song," a pedal steel-laced rootsy number sung as a phone call to his girl back home that rhymes “Cracker Barrel” with “Will Ferrell” and includes this chorus: “I know it’s not what you’d call necessary/And I know that I’m no Steve Perry/But even if you roll your eyes and groan/I’m still writing you a road song that you can call your own."
     It may not be Top 40 material, but anyone who can drop a Journey reference into a country song about the rigors of band life is totally cool in my book.
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