Review: Fountains of Wayne, "Sky Full of Holes"

Sky Full of Holes
Fountains of Wayne
Yep Roc
08.02.11

It's not easy being the smartest kid in the pop-rock class, even less so when you're the most real, and Fountains of Wayne have always been both ever since their 1996 self-titled debut. They began as an intoxicating mix of jangle-pop and Beach Boys beauty imbued with post-Weezer pop-punkish energy, but their secret weapon was nonetheless lyrical: a real gift for characterization that made every song a little five-star romcom.

You'd never know it from the way they were presented by their record label, though. As they grew bigger, the pressure to turn up the volume and turn down the empathy made their literary-grade sketches seem more like frat boy jokes. The subtle nuances, the tells that made Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood's songs open up and bleed, weren't obliterated, but they were made harder to spot. The big stupid hit, "Stacy's Mom," seemed like a novelty song on the radio; in the context of their whole catalog, it almost takes on the weight of The Graduate.

They followed up the hit with 2007's Traffic and Weather, the nadir of their corporate relationship. Though it still contained much of what made FOW great, the punchlines seemed more important, the irony less necessary than ever -- "Revolving Dora" was just a bad pun, "Planet of Weed" a bad skit. And when NFL films started using the heavily ironic "All Kinds of Time" (from the previous album) straightfaced under highlight clips, it seemed like the real point of Fountains of Wayne might be lost forever.

But maturity is not always the death knell for pop-rock bands, especially those who were never taken as seriously as they should have been. Four years later, Sky Full of Holes is the place where the band gets serious. And obviously so.

It doesn't happen all at once. "The Summer Place" is a lyrically grim opener about the PTSD of childhood memories, and how they leave ripples throughout our adult lives, but then "Richie and Ruben" and "Acela" show up, respectively, to rag on two get-rich-quick friends and to catch a little strange with some random train passenger.

But here's the thing. Adam and Chris actually have a game plan this time out, even if they don't claim to recognize it themselves in interviews -- all of the above songs deal with the possibly inevitable failure that comes with middle age. The dad of "Action Hero" sublimates his dreams and loses his sanity, "Radio Bar" pretends to rock out as a Dickensian dream trip back to a wasted youth, and "Hate To See You Like This" delineates the kind of clinical, everyday, non-emo depression that adults simply learn to live with.

And when the duo stretches out, it hits even harder: the way "Cold Comfort Flowers" drifts into psychedelic poesy merely to punch up the sting of bitter celebrity failure, or the way "A Road Song" -- a new high in vulnerability -- acknowledges its own cliches while somehow rhyming "Cracker Barrel" and "Will Ferrell" and making it work. The climax is the deceptively simple "Cemetery Guns," which may be the last nail in the coffin of millennium irony, a stark portrait of a military funeral that's direct without being mawkish. Fountains of Wayne have spent 15 years at their job, subtly revealing the emotional warzone hiding behind suburbia; with this release, they've proven they can look life square in the eye without flinching. Stacy's mom, wherever she is, can probably relate.

Graded using the Third Eye Method:

Impact: 78. Musically, they've slowed down a bit, but emotionally, they've hit the ground running.

Invention: 68. The music rarely matches the mood with FOW, but that's often the best thing about them. Quietly devastating, and not necessarily quiet.
Integrity: 88. HBO wishes it was this subtle in creating characters.