Music Box | Fountains of Wayne

Google tells me that as many as 13 Fountains of Wayne album or concert reviews contain the word “sugar” or one of its variants. That critical short-circuiting once struck me as odd—bands with a higher sugar content didn’t get this characterization nearly as much—but after hearing Traffic and Weather, I finally understand. More so than on previous offerings, these songs give the listener an initial burst of flavor that quickly subsides in favor of shameful feelings and an upset stomach.

Power-pop as a genre has become a guilty pleasure ever since Weezer fell out of favor, but Fountains of Wayne have remained true to their uncool sound from the beginning of their decade-long career. Grungy guitars, a crisp 4/4 beat, ’50s-style piano, underdog stories—these are a few of Fountains of Wayne’s favorite things. They’re the sort of band that cites Burt Bacharach and Buddy Holly as influences (though they sound more like an updated version of Fastball than anything else) and believes that all anyone needs is love and a really big chorus. While so many current pop outfits worth their salt—Spoon, The Shins, Broken Social Scene, even Fall Out Boy—aim to challenge us somehow, Fountains of Wayne keep things simple. Way, way too simple.

It’s all moderately catchy, too, but it never once goes beyond that. During my first pass through the Americana-lite “92 Subaru,” I found myself tapping my feet to the punchy guitars and driving beat. The second pass was less satisfying, like birthday cake I didn’t feel like eating, since one go was all it took to tell me everything I needed to know about “92 Subaru,” lock, stock, and barrel. The third pass didn’t even last two minutes. Traffic and Weather is assembly-line music, happy and jovial enough but unmistakably constructed in a factory or a lab rather than in the Williams College dorm where they all met. It screams “Ready for the radio!” like the worst emo and party rap, and while Fountains of Wayne would probably like us to pay attention, every song kept hitting the part of my brain that only half-listens and naturally tunes things out.

There’s nothing wrong with the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus rubric to which they adhere so closely, and it made them an ideal pick to write the hit rock ‘n roll number from 1964/1996, “That Thing You Do” (from the movie of the same name, but you knew that). Yet four albums and a B-side compilation later and they’re still serving up much of the same, so you’ll excuse me for thinking it’s getting a bit long in the tooth. Once in a while they’ll stretch themselves, as on the polished country-rock of “Fire in the Canyon” or the Prince-Yes soundclash “Strapped for Cash,” and it sort of works, though the effort is appreciated more than the results. A duck that dresses up like Shirley Temple is still a duck, but power-pop is an incredibly confining genre, so I suppose we’ll take what we can get.

Worse, singer Adam Schlessinger is a mediocre storyteller with too many stories to tell. “Seth Shapiro got his law degree,” the album begins, “he moved to Brooklyn from Schenectady, ’93/Got some clients in the food industry.” So? The road-beaten hopefuls in these songs get flattened by Schlessinger’s propensity for dumb little details (do we need to know that one woman “takes the contacts out of her eyes” before bed?) without his humanizing them in a way that matters to us. The album reaches a lyrical nadir during “Michael and Heather at the Baggage Claim,” which revolves around some lost “soft and brown” luggage. Lurking somewhere in there is a suburban yarn about people who love each other in the face of everyday hardships, but it requires too much guesswork. Throughout Traffic and Weather, we’re left to plow through empty narratives whose meaning and raison d'être may be clear to the songwriters, but leave us scratching our heads at the starting line.

So in the end, we’ve got a standard-issue power-pop album that will give Fountains of Wayne devotees their next fix but will keep everyone else at arm’s length, at least after the initial sugar high dissipates. Most aspects of Traffic and Weather are difficult to flat-out dislike, and the welding of rock and electronic instrumentation in many of these songs is actually pretty impressive. But if Fountains of Wayne make it all sound easy, it also seems like they didn’t try very hard, especially for their first full-length effort in four years (roughly 120 music years). And if there’s anything this album is not, it’s a “grower,” with the potential to bore, annoy, even anger those who find themselves on the wrong side of it for too long. Traffic and Weather, indeed.