Send "Fountains of Wayne " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Sputnikmusic |
 I am hopelessly addicted to nostalgia. In this I don’t think I’m that much different from the rest of the world. I dread growing older, I have a peculiar affinity for keeping useless junk that long ago grew thick with dust around in various drawers and desk corners, I refuse to throw away concert t-shirts from half a decade ago – in short, I don’t let go of the past easily. It’s a habit I’ve been trying to break, but few things make that harder than music. Listening to Elliott Smith reminds me of a hundred different things, from middle school to break ups, while the Stills remind me of the last summer before college and Cut Copy vividly recreates living in my fraternity house two years ago. Fountains of Wayne, meanwhile, conjures up my first year in high school, a time when I thought I was so ***ing cool for listening to Welcome Interstate Managers before “Stacy’s Mom” hit the radio (I’m either the only person to do this or my memory of myself in high school is a lot more flattering than reality). Welcome Interstate Managers was one of the first legit power-pop records I’d ever listened to, and I could have done a lot worse. It’s FoW at their most wry, Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger at the peak of their tongue-in-cheek lyrical powers and with sixteen killer hooks to boot. I bring all this up because, in the context of their follow-ups, 2007’s Traffic and Weather and now Sky Full of Holes, I feel like nostalgia has betrayed me once again.Was Welcome Interstate Managers a great record? Listening to it again I love every second of it, even the ill-advised country romp, yet I hesitate to label it as such without worrying about my nostalgic affection for it, an unreasonable adoration based more upon what doors it opened for me musically and because “Hackensack” made my first crush swoon. Sky Full of Holes, in style and in execution, is not that much different from Welcome Interstate Managers, yet 22-year-old me has trouble finding anything to enjoy in it. I want to say that the hooks just aren’t as good as they used to be, but “The Summer Place” and “Someone’s Gonna Break Your Heart” are the stuff power-pop wet dreams are made of. I want to say that Schlesinger and Collingwood’s inane slice-of-life lyrics have begun to grate, but their rhymes have always been banal and their massive cast of characters predictably caricatured. This is a band that has always been resistant to change, but power-pop bands make their living with their melodies, and FoW have always had those in plentiful supply. So is it Fountains of Wayne’s fault that Sky Full of Holes doesn’t have me humming its tunes under my breath for weeks on end, or is it my own romantic expectations that can never reasonably be fulfilled? I can appreciate what the band is doing here, favoring acoustic-based melodies over bombastic choruses and poor diversions into genre traps that made nearly half of Traffic and Weather nigh unlistenable. As Sky Full of Holes rolls along, however, and the hooks don’t punch quite as urgently as “The Summer Place” or as smoothly as “A Dip In The Ocean,” it just seems like another entry in the FoW School of Songwriting. Create motley cast of everyday characters, like a pair of failed businessmen (“Richie and Ruben”). Write a song about their personal problems, preferably with cultural references that are sure to date your album, like the unnecessary Will Ferrell name drop on “A Road Song.” Throw in an aces hook that almost makes all these mundane Everyman problems seem worthwhile and you have your next Fountains of Wayne single, albeit one that sounds pretty damn similar to the one before and after it....full text |
| Avclub |
| If there’s a running theme in Fountains Of Wayne’s work, it’s this: Banality points toward truth, because it’s almost always a lie. This is expressed directly in the wry story-songs of Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood, which chronicle the minor yet cosmically funny injustices commonly found in suburban America, and more subtly in the slick, shiny packaging of their bubblegum melodies and production. Superficially, Sky Full Of Holes replicates the sticky-sweet power-pop that Fountains Of Wayne has reliably turned out since the mid-’90s, when the band was as out-of-step with grunge and rap-rock as it is now among too-cool indie bands. Dig a little deeper, however, and Sky Full Of Holes progresses an ongoing story that has unfolded over the course of several albums. Having already addressed the end of adolescence (on 1999’s Utopia Parkway), post-collegiate doldrums (2003’s Welcome Interstate Managers), and thirtysomething single life (2007’s Traffic And Weather), Fountains Of Wayne dutifully settles into adulthood on Sky Full Of Holes. It isn’t an easy process for the protagonist of “The Summer Place,” who daydreams about her days as a teenage shoplifter and swallows psychedelic mushrooms by the handful to alleviate her grown-up boredom. The business partners in “Richie And Ruben” haven’t given up on their dreams, but considering that they can’t get their shit together—illustrated via a long list of failures recounted by Collingwood in his reedy, vaguely detached tenor—perhaps that isn’t a good thing....full text |
| Guardian |
| On their fifth album, Fountains of Wayne appear to have tired of rocking. Gone are the massive arena rock choruses that were the sugar on their tart character sketches; this time the New York powerpop band have eschewed the power in favour of a more sedate sound, the dominant texture being acoustic guitar overlaid with muted electrics. It suits them: Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger have lost none of their facility with melody, and the gentler approach makes the lyrics seem more empathetic. In the past, Fountains of Wayne sometimes seemed to be sneering at their cast of salesman and waitresses; here, even the hapless entrepreneurs of Richie and Ruben are viewed with a certain sympathy. There are still some formulaic tics – the references to pop culture figures (Steve Perry, Will Ferrell) are little more than cheap rhymes, and the album's opening line – "She's been afraid of the Cuisinart since 1977" – could have been written by a FoW random lyrics generator. But the closing Cemetery Guns, beautifully arranged and written with calm understatement, suggests that after 15 years Collingwood and Schlesinger can thrive without recourse to irony....full text |
Fountains of Wayne lyrics
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