Fountains Of Wayne|Traffic & Weather|97 US, 172 UK

[Slinky]

This album has grown on me a bit since the last time I posted. I'm starting to really like "New Routine", "'92 Subaru", and "This Better Be Good" in addition to the tracks I already posted about. It's still weaker than the other 3 FOW albums, but I'd now rate it an 8 or 8.5. It's a solid addition to their catalog.

[busyboy]

Phases & Stages
BY GREG BEETS

In anticipation of hurricane season, Fountains of Wayne proffers an uncommonly strong batch of shiny red pop songs as a salve for hot afternoon commutes with no air conditioning. Although their strivings toward pop-cultural zeitgeist seem quaint in an age of fragmentation, you have to admire Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger for their everyman voices and cheeky middlebrow wit. As its drive-time-inspired title suggests, Traffic and Weather concentrates on life and love in the ever-moving workaday world. "Someone to Love" offers a bouncy message of hope for deadheading white-collar careerists, while "Yolanda Hayes" uses horn-laden Britpop to reveal the colorful soul within a DMV bureaucrat. The Jersey quartet lets its classic rock fantasies run wild on "'92 Subaru" before channeling Tom T. Hall on "I-95," an evocative road ballad peppered with fading radio signals and truck-stop kitsch. Front to back, this 14-song slice of bop-worthy Americana hits the spot like hamburgers and coffee.

Rating: (out of 5)

[busyboy]

slinky said:

This album has grown on me a bit since the last time I posted. I'm starting to really like "New Routine", "'92 Subaru", and "This Better Be Good" in addition to the tracks I already posted about. It's still weaker than the other 3 FOW albums, but I'd now rate it an 8 or 8.5. It's a solid addition to their catalog.

I gave it a few more listens and it grew on me too. Still, the gap compared to their other albums is great.

Anyway...

97 FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE TRAFFIC & WEATHER 52 11,509 22032.7% 11,562

Congrats again!

[busyboy]

Metacritic



With 19 reviews I think this is pretty definitive.

Serious music for silly people

April 17, 2007

ROCK
Fountains of Wayne
Traffic and Weather
(Virgin)
Essential: "Yolanda Hayes"

We don’t know why it takes so long for Fountains of Wayne to make new records — typically three or four years — but we’ll suffer the breaks for the now typically terrific payoff. On its fourth album, the quartet continues to craft tracks that veer from silly to sublime, from power-pop guitar anthems to country rock with lyrical wit, musical panache, and equal measures of sincerity and irony. The delight is, as usual, in the tiny details and the twists of tongue: the ‘‘Virginia is for Lovers’’ T-shirts on sale at the rest-stop gift shop on the melancholy ‘‘I-95’’; two coots telling each other ‘‘jokes that they both know that they both know’’ in the restless ‘‘New Routine.’’ If ‘‘Traffic and Weather,’’ doesn’t as frequently pack the knock-out punch of 2003’s superb ‘‘Welcome Interstate Managers,’’ it still more than holds its own in the fight for pop music that is both catchy and canny. [Sarah Rodman]

[areyoureadytojump]

4/28/07 chart:

149 FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE TRAFFIC & WEATHER 11,509 5,817 -49.5% 17,379

[busyboy]

Blender

The best piece of rock criticism recently wasn’t a review or an essay but a song: Robbie Fulks’s “Fountains of Wayne Hotline,” which affectionately skewered the Radical Dynamic Shift, the Slightly Distorted Melodic Solo and other cornerstones of FOW’s style. Fans of the world’s greatest power-pop group will be relieved that, on album No. 4, all the tropes Fulks lampooned are still present. And why not? Few bands have had such consistently glorious results worshipping at the altar of scuzzy-sweet ’70s am radio and stomping hard on the distortion pedal just as verse turns to chorus.

Of course, there’s more to FOW than a formula. What’s set them apart from the Sloans and OK Gos of the world are Chris Collingwood’s and Adam Schlesinger’s supreme storytelling skills. They’ve carved their niche as bridge-and-tunnel bards, spinning finely detailed, funny, often touching tales of slackers, middle managers and high-school geeks adrift in the New York City suburbs.

On Traffic and Weather, their lyrical touch slips. There are bad puns (“Revolving Dora”) and lame satires (the stoner send-up “Planet of Weed”). The title track, about horny news anchors, feels as interminable as a bad SNL skit. And where Collingwood and Schlesinger once sympathized with their characters, they now exude snootiness. “’92 Subaru” spoofs a poor sap who installs a “lime green plasma screen” in his junker ride. “Someone to Love” sniffs at a lonely girl watching The King of Queens and a guy who returns home from a lame job and “puts Coldplay on/Pours a glass of wine.” Collingwood can’t disguise his snicker.

This being Fountains of Wayne, there are plenty of big hooks and deliciously tacky guitar-and-synth riffs to enliven the dead spots. And with “Hotel Majestic,” they deliver a great song, dropping social satire in favor of a fractured, surreal confession (“Now it’s Pekoe tea/With a reflection of me/My only company”). Maybe that’s a way forward for this still terrific but slightly depleted band. It’s better, anyway, than more songs about bad jobs and worse cars.

Download: “This Better Be Good,” “Hotel Majestic”

Rating: 3.5/5

[busyboy]

Fountains Of Wayne to release instore session
New York performance is due out in a month

Fountains Of Wayne are set to release an eight-song session recorded at the Soho Apple Store in New York last week.

The band will be the second ever to release their Apple Store session (the first was The Good, The Bad & The Queen) and it will feature performances of 'Hackensack', 'Valley Winter Song' and more. The session is due for release next month, with a date to be confirmed.

The band released their new album 'Traffic And Weather' on April 3, and are currently in the midst of a tour which will see them play a number of shows in the US before heading to Europe and returning to the US for more dates.

The session tracklisting will feature:

'Barbara H'
'Hackensack'
'Fire In The Canyon'
'Valley Winter Song'
'Yolanda Hayes'
'I 95'
'Red Dragon Tattoo'
'Joe Rey'

The dates are:

New York, NY Webster Hall (April 24)
Philadelphia, PA Trocadero (25)
Indio, CA Coachella Music and Arts Festival (28)
San Francisco, CA Great American Music Hall (30)
Dublin, Ireland Ambassador (May 17)
Glasgow, Scotland ABC (19)
Manchester, UK Academy2 (20)
London, UK Astoria (21)
Pittsburgh, PA Diesel Club Lounge (June 7)
Cleveland, OH House of Blues (9)
Toronto, ONT, CAN Lee's Palace (10)
Detroit, MI St. Andrews Hall (11)
Minneapolis, MN First Avenue (13)
Oshkosh, WI Waterfest (14)
Chicago, IL Taste of Randolph (15)
Manchester, TN Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival (16)
Atlanta, GA Variety Playhouse (19)

[busyboy]

"Someone To Love" video and... NME review:

Fountains Of Wayne
NME rating: 3/10
Traffic And Weather

You know Fountains Of Wayne, right? Creepy old alterna-rock dudes writing songs about 13-year-olds fancying their best friend's "mom", like Busted if they'd been neutered and fattened up on cheeseburgers. Fountains would say this was OK, of course - they're all about writing universal pop songs for the American everyman, like Bacharach or Brian Wilson. But there are two reasons why 'Traffic And Weather' sucks. One, their songs are either shitty soft-rock or worse, wink-nudge pastiches like the new-wavey 'Someone To Love'. And two, they deal in the sort of cod-sentimentality that's as smug and contrived as Bono peeling onions.

Louis Pattison

[busyboy]

More than a month since it was released and reviews still coming in, here's the latest...

Fountains of Wayne - 'Traffic And Weather'

Released on 07/05/07
Label: Virgin

It's been eleven years since New Jersey boys Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood launched a career built on power-pop, droll couplets about doleful Generation Xers, generally good reviews and generally woeful sales; just four years since the unexpectedly massive hit "Stacey's Mom", buoyed by a chorus as knowingly bodacious as Rachel Hunter in the accompanying video. Fast-forward to 2007, past hiatuses and side projects and Schlesinger becoming The Man when Hollywood needs fictional hit songs for Hugh'n'Drew rom-coms.

The unadorned truth is that Fountains Of Wayne's fourth album, "Traffic And Weather", offers neither real surprises for the faithful nor a sure-fire candidate for another hit (and lubricious promo clip.) It also fails to offer much respite to those who come out in a rash at FOW's tendency to lard songs with cultural references of almost microscopic specificity; here we get Schenectady, La Quinta Inns, Costco, the I95, Sea Bright, Bowling Green and the names of NBC's Channel 6 news anchors. In fact, if Schlesinger and Collingwood were any more indigenous, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall would be slow-roasting them.

Nevertheless, unless you're one of the allergic, there's little not to love. Crucially, "Traffic And Weather" sounds fantastic: every track has a dashboard-glow of pure AM magic, thanks to production so bright and unrepentantly shiny you could check your teeth for spinach in it. As on past efforts, it's the pop album as a series of masterfully arranged lucky dips. "92 Subaru" is a cowbell-clanging fusion of Steve Miller and Nick Lowe; "This Better Be Good" blossoms into Beach Boys harmonies all the lovelier for their incongruity; the ELO-ish "Strapped For Cash" adds cheeky flashes of Billy Joel's "Movin' Out" and M's "Pop Muzik"; "Hotel Majestic" boasts five stars' worth of Cars synths and handclaps.

And, hinting that even the throwaways were plotted with mischievous care, "Planet Of Weed" grins its way through guitar doodles, muffled chatter and off-kilter percussion supplied by what sounds suspiciously like car keys. With sounds this luscious, the wry lyrics are merely a bonus. You'll find neat little lines about elderly Carl Reiner lookalikes spending their retirement winding up waitresses in a soaraway "New Routine", and the new-wave-flavoured "Someone To Love" painstakingly provides back-stories for Coldplay-loving singletons clearly destined to "meet cute" … but then she nicks his taxi, and they don't.

But the real secret to "Traffic And Weather"'s charm lies in what Collingwood's technically unremarkable voice does with those clever words, taking infinite care, in songs such as a wearily countrified "Seatbacks And Traytables", to imbue every syllable with flickers of sarcasm, resignation, self-deception, tenderness...and even hope. Which is apparently somewhere near Schenectady.



by Jennifer Nine

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Metascore based on 23 reviews: