Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look.
One upon a time it was a whole lot easier being a Fountains of Wayne fan. And then that cloying Cars “tribute” song “Stacy’s Mom” was shoved down our throats for much of 2003 and beyond. The fact that the track was probably the most musically derivative and least lyrically competent song the band ever recorded did nothing to change the fact that in the mid-2000s the song was seemingly everywhere. In much the same way that “Shiny Happy People” did for R.E.M. or that “Dancing in the Dark” did for Bruce Springsteen a half-decade before that, the single reached the masses and got the band paid but gave lifelong devotees a proverbial mainstream chip on their shoulder. If you’re a Fountains of Wayne fan and haven’t yet realized that the band’s legacy will unfairly start and end with that Rachel Hunter-casted, Fast Times at Ridgemont High-cribbing paean to MILF love, you’re kidding yourself.
Indeed life was simpler in 1996, when Fountains of Wayne was just a duo consisting of Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger. That year, Collingwood and Schlesinger, with help from non-member Danny Weinkauf on bass, released their self-titled debut, which 15 years later still stands as one of the few power-pop records to escape that decade without feeling painfully dated or like an act of Big Star plagiarism. The album has since been largely remembered as an upbeat and infectiously catchy dose of pop rock. That’s correct, though only partially. On songs like leadoff track/debut single “Radiation Vibe” and “Survival Car” – a road song of sorts – the band mastered the art of the up-tempo earworm; few songs still sound as instantly fun and memorable as these. With its title character who’s ugly as sin, constantly stoned, always parked in front of the TV, and is somehow still wildly popular, “Joe Rey” plays like a giant inside joke, a compendium of various personality types all rolled up into one folkloric, if somewhat reprehensible, individual.
But this shiny pop exterior obscures the album’s dark demeanor. It’d be a stretch to cite “Leave the Biker” as an example – its cartoonish villain, complete with tattoos, face scars and “{crumbs in his beard from the seafood special},” precludes that – but it’s still a song about heartache, even if the narrator’s complaint that his world is collapsing is typical of an overdramatic adolescent. Other portions of the album are far less humorous: the boredom and nihilism of “Sink to the Bottom,” the jittery angst of “Please Don’t Rock Me Tonight” and the foreboding of both “You Curse at Girls” and “Everything’s Ruined” all lend the album a degree of seriousness that often goes unmentioned in assessments of Fountains of Wayne. The album is one of small tragedies, often with women as the central figures. “She’s Got a Problem” is unarguably dire, a slow ballad that takes as its subject a suicidal woman whose self-inflicted ending is given as a foregone conclusion. “Sick Day,” meanwhile, tracks a woman in her mundane daily work life in a big city, its supporting cast of characters including an obese secretary, bums on the subway and a homeless person in his “cardboard coffin.”
Despite this very adult subject matter, Fountains of Wayne is principally still regarded as a musical slice of summer; and truth be told, no listener walks away from it filled with existentialist dread or even simple sadness. But why? Probably it all boils down to those flawless, deceptively carefree arrangements; the same trick that gets people at ball games to howl along like a werewolf of London or ebulliently declare that they wanna be sedated. And maybe that’s the real genius behind Fountains of Wayne: listeners can choose to simply delight in its perfect pop instrumentation, but with added reflection the album reveals itself as more nuanced and one whose lyrics tell an entirely different – and frequently pessimistic – story.
