FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE
Traffic and Weather / Virgin

Over the course of their 11-year career, Fountains of Wayne have succeeded in, if nothing else, being scribes of the American suburbs. Songwriters Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood have proven themselves adept at capturing the apathy, angst, laziness, and smart-ass cleverness characteristic of the ‘burbs, usually within the context of a sunny, hook-filled power pop song. Traffic and Weather diverges little from this formula. While there’s a fair amount of sub-par material here (a good 25% being filler and nothing really approaching the infectious nature of their 1996 self-titled debut), when they get it right, it really works. As with their previous work, their strength is in their storytelling. FOW have the uncanny ability to create quirky characters in their songs, zooming in on the minute details that make them who they are—what they eat, how they move, when they dream—and in doing so, make it easy for the listener to identify with them. “New Routine” depicts a series of characters who dream of escaping the limitations they were born with by first getting out of their dead end towns. “I-95” rattles on about the lengths we go to, intolerable truck stops we tolerate, and bad radio stations we endure to make long distance relationships survive. And like that nine hour drive to a long, lost lover, so is listening to this album beginning to end: difficult but survivable, with brief patches of pure, unblemished joy.