Music Review: Fountains of Wayne - Traffic and Weather

Two men in a diner who “look quite a bit like Carl Reiner.” A “late ‘92 baby blue Subaru” with a “lime green plasma screen television.” “Highway hotels and their air-conditioned cable-ready cold padded cells.” Michael and Heather at the Lost and Found, forever “looking for luggage that’s soft and brown.” The girlfriend caught “sharing a hot dog with mustard after work with that same old polyester jerk…”

…Stay tuned for more. With Traffic and Weather, manic pop thrill-meisters Fountains of Wayne continue their dependable track-by-track record of pure pop for now people, with more witty vignettes and incisive character studies set to hook-filled pop-rock delirium. But as solidly infectious and consistently spirited as the album is, it doesn’t quite have anything as sublimely soaring as “Amity Gardens,” or as sublimely poignant as “Troubled Times,” both from the group’s finest album, Utopia Parkway. Nor -- while I'm mining gems from that 1999 album -- are the bounciest songs on Traffic as bouncy as “Red Dragon Tattoo,” or the punchiest as punchy as “Denise.”

So if the new release offers no drastic departures and sustains the holding-pattern delights of 1993’s Welcome Interstate Managers and “Stacy’s Mom,” it still has enough staying power in its pleasures to make you forget there’s little gravitas in the grooves. That doesn’t mean the fun is all facile and the themes cartoonish, however. For every enjoyable song — about, say, “Channel Six news team” romance (“Traffic and Weather“), or of the souped-up events that transpire after “I bought a car off a couple o' ladies way upstate / Took off the Greenpeace sticker and the New Hampshire plates” (“’92 Subaru”) -- songwriters Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood pile on more with storylines and sympathetic characters that draw you further in.

Some Beach Boys-style harmonies help make “This Better Be Good” a stand-out track that mightily amuses, but you’re also gonna want to stick around to see what happens after the opening sets up a little trouble in relationship paradise that's less than fun, fun, fun: 

I saw you holding hands
With some guy wearing light blue Dockers pants
And I thought that I might just give you a chance to explain
What the hell is in your brain
You know you pretend you're going to Sea Bright
For the long weekend but something don't seem right
And your best friend Renee keeps on saying she saw you at the Gap with somebody in a baseball cap.

And you know
This better be good
This better be good…

In addition to such lyrical and vocal overtures and cues, some subtly clever musical shorthand seems also to be at the ready to point the way. In “Yolanda Hayes,” a tale about yearned-for love at the DMV between a lad in an everlasting line and the clerk behind window B, the Beatlesesque flourishes may be more than flukes or obvious and oft-used pop-rock touchstones. The punctuating guitar lines that closely recall the encouraging “Getting Better,” and horns that evoke the expectant hopes of “Got To Get You Into My Life,” allude to a certain and optimistic destiny.

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for San Diego Union Tribune Books (R.I.P.). For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores, when not engaged in serious lollygagging. …

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