Fountains Of Wayne
Welcome Interstate Managers (S-Curve)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Space City Rock, Summer 2004

The thing that pisses me off about Fountains of Wayne is that they’re so clearly capable of greatness that their continued failure to achieve it seems less like thwarted potential than some sort of perverse death wish on the parts of band leaders Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger. For the first half of Welcome Interstate Managers, they pretty much nail the wry guitar pop that they’ve been promising since their 1996 self-titled debut before loading up the second half with the same self-congratulatory cleverness that they’ve been doling out instead.

Not that they don’t threaten to give us more of the same from the start. The opening “Mexican Wine” is about nothing in particular, mostly because Collingwood is more interested in coming up with clever rhymes than in creating meaningful images; alas, all he can think up are “apartment,” “department” and “glove compartment.” Two songs later, “Stacy’s Mom” amuses itself with thoughts of lusting after an older woman, but there’s nothing really at stake for the teenager telling the tale. “Maggie Mae” told us that this particular topic can work in a pop song (and Outkast’s recent “Pink & Blue” proved there’s still some mileage left in it), but the difference is that Rod Stewart really explored the situation and expressed what the narrator’s feelings really meant to him and what they cost. The closest FoW come to Stewart’s achievement is to cast his ex Rachel Hunter in the video.

But if those two songs don’t bug me nearly as much as they should, that’s probably because (for a while, anyway) they’re anomalies which are followed up immediately by songs that make good on their intentions in spades. The Nazz-powered pounder “Bright Future In Sales” relies on the same sort of lyrical randomness of “Mexican Wine” but instead of trying to show us how smart they are, they go for fucked up and dorky. And fucked up and dorky win out every time, simply because they fuel the how-the-hell-did-I-get-here subtext of the story, so that the cleverness of the rhymes adds up to more than the inevitable conclusion to a couplet (extra points for the liner notes’ recognition that the words “Yeah, yeah” are an integral part of the chorus). “Little Red Light,” meanwhile, showcases Collingwood trying to blaze his way through traffic jams both literal and emotional, identifying a nail in the chorus (“It’s not right, it’s not fair/I’m still a mess and you still don’t care”) and hitting it squarely on the head.

Those songs simply take the band’s preexisting strengths and capitalize on them, but the real turning point of FoW’s evolution is in their acknowledgement that they’ve never really been able to expand their worldview beyond the tri-state area. They still can’t leave, to be sure, but they’ve begun to notice that others are making it out. The dude singing “No Better Place,” in fact, can’t even fathom why his friend would split, despite every indication that sticking around’s not doing him any good, either. The album’s best song is “Hackensack,” which is built around an equally eye-rolling idea to that of “Stacy’s Mom” and stumbles face-first into sincerity. It paints a picture of a New Jersey nobody who expects a former classmate (probably a girl, definitely a stranger) who made it big to come back to him, and it does so with such clarity and economy that there’s no room to try to be funny. As a result, the chorus tag (“If you ever get back to Hackensack/I’ll be here for you”) is chilling, even as it’s unclear if the narrator’s predicting the other person’s crash back to obscurity or simply waiting for a salvation of his own that’s obviously never coming. In either case, the band is finally invested in the words it’s delivering.

It’s a shame, then, that all the work that FoW have put in wiping the smirks off of their faces is almost undone once the second half of the album starts. “Halley’s Waitress” is a sarcastic paean that’s essentially about nothing more than waiting for the check to arrive, and it’s what sister band Ivy would sound like if the latter traded their romantic fatalism for pointless minutiae. It’s followed up by the unconvincing country lament “Hung Up On You,” a silly joke based around a low-grade pun (which nonetheless demonstrates that Collingwood’s voice is actually astonishingly well-suited to Gram Parsons-styled Americana when he stops singing through his nose and opens up the back of his throat); “Fire Island,” which is like a rewrite of Utopia Parkway ’s “Prom Theme” but a lot less poignant; and “Peace and Love,” which reiterates the loathing for hippiedom shown by the band in the past.

By the end of “Bought For A Song,” which has the virtue of rocking as forthrightly as “Mexican Wine” and the misfortune of possessing an equally insignificant lyric, any hopes that FoW have learned anything from the album’s first half have faded almost completely. But then comes “Supercollider,” which is gorgeous and the most atmospheric thing the band’s ever done. It works in part because I don’t know what they’re going on about, though the references to bongs and Pink Floyd suggest that it may well just be another satire on psychedelia (or possibly “Champagne Supernova”). But it fucking works, is the thing, and if they absolutely insist on pulling this kind of shit, then this better by God be the way that they do it. I think they know it, too; they’ve got nothing left afterwards except for the straightforward “Yours And Mine” (essentially “I’m In Love With A Girl” with props). It’s not the first time that Fountains of Wayne trip over simple honesty on Welcome Interstate Managers. But by now it looks like they’re finally thinking of picking it up.

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