Fountains Of Wayne – Traffic And Weather
Fountains Of Wayne, God bless ’em, have little use for pop anthems. Masters of the colloquial, they preach to their devoted choir by hunkering down in the familiar, making mundane phrases (“Seatbacks and tray tables up”), ordinary character names (“Michael and Heather at the baggage claim”) and celebrity name-checks (“Two men sit in the corner of a diner/Both of them look quite a bit like Carl Reiner”) work as hooks all their own. But as catchy and quirky as the songs are, they are streaked with longing. There is no meeting cute for urban love-seekers Seth Shapiro and Beth Mackenzie; in beating him to a taxi, she “cuts in front of him and leaves him for dead.”
Picking up where 2003’s Welcome Interstate Managers left off, Traffic And Weather is a procession of deadpan vignettes fitted with delectable guitar-driven melodies. A road album which treats that conceit lightly, it takes us down “every crooked road,” from the slacker heaven that is “The Planet Of Weed” to, appropriately, the DMV. Travelling in high style, the band absconds Beach Boys harmonies and Steely Dan jazzisms, goes crunch when it needs to, and keeps the wordplay coming (rhyme of the month: “law degree” and “Schenectady”).
Is there a “Stacy’s Mom” here? Not to these ears, but Traffic And Weather (which is how a news anchor and his female partner “belong together,” he declares) sustains itself over the long run a bit better than its more stylistically varied predecessor.