Plenty of albums have achieved the status of immortal; only a handful of album reviews can say the same.\u00a0 One of those was an early review of Queen\u2019s A Day At The Races<\/i>, in which the Times of London<\/i> described the song \u201cTie Your Mother Down\u201d as \u201csheer bloody poetry.\u201d Not only was the critic right; the quote stuck to the band like a politician to their #1 donor.<\/p>\n
The thing about power-pop savants Fountains Of Wayne is, just about every single track they\u2019ve released over a 15-year, five-album career could comfortably and accurately carry the same description\u2014sheer bloody poetry from the pens (and guitars) of the emperors of irony, the sultans of the sardonic, the wonder boys of wistful, the songwriting team of singer-guitarist Chris Collingwood and bassist-producer Adam Schlesinger.<\/p>\n
Sky Full Of Holes<\/i> finds the guys a little older and perhaps a little more subdued, but no less artful in their exploration of the foibles of the memorable characters who inevitably populate their guitar-driven story-songs.\u00a0 Whether it\u2019s the spectacularly dysfunctional city family doing time together at \u201cThe Summer Place,\u201d or the hopelessly out-of-their-depth would-be restaurateurs \u201cRichie and Ruben,\u201d these are characters filled with flaws, stumbling through life trying to find a rhythm and a meaning to it all.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
The thing that Collingwood and Schlesinger manage to do over and over again that is so unique and so remarkable, is to manage to sketch these invented personalities as fully as any novelist could hope to in the space of a few brilliantly rhymed lines.\u00a0 You sense if you walked up to these characters on the street, you would recognize them immediately.<\/p>\n
On this album, the boys do flex their creative muscles a bit.\u00a0 While there\u2019s nothing much new on the musical front\u2014if anything, Collingwood and Schlesinger\u2019s bandmates Jody Porter (lead guitar) and Brian Young (drums) have less to do than usual\u2014they do take chances like writing a fanciful, acerbic ode to a train in \u201cAcela,\u201d and leaving behind any suggestion of plot or characters altogether on the driving, surrealistic, simply gorgeous \u201cSomeone\u2019s Gonna Break Your Heart.\u201d<\/p>\n
The thing that\u2019s so remarkable about FOW, though, is that they never, ever fail to make their art entertain.\u00a0 The sweetly elegiac \u201cAction Hero\u201d salutes the grand fantasies and mundane, stressful realities of life as a suburban dad.\u00a0 \u201cA Dip In The Ocean\u201d is an upbeat melodic rocker whose couplets flow so smoothly it\u2019s like crossing the Raspberries with Eminem and coming up with a handful of raspberry M&Ms; this song positively sparkles. \u201cCold Comfort Flowers\u201d is a keening masterpiece of simply phenomenal poetry; the way they match the long \u201ci\u201ds and the soft \u201ca\u201ds so that the lines rush along in a steady flow of like sounds are the stuff all-star MCs are made of.<\/p>\n
\u201cRoad Song\u201d does another of the things that these guys do best, which is grab a clich\u00e9 and turn it inside out, into something new and fun and insightful.\u00a0 Certainly, they\u2019re the only songwriters you\u2019ll ever find who would (a) think to rhyme Cracker Barrel with Will Ferrell, and (b) put it in context so it emerges as naturally as the conversation you\u2019d have with anyone walking down the street. (It\u2019s a strange gift, but a gift nonetheless.)\u00a0 The capper, though, is the disarming playfulness of the conversation the narrator is having with his girlfriend back home about the fact that he\u2019s writing her a road song, admitting that he\u2019s making her roll her eyes and groan\u2026 it\u2019s thoroughly charming.<\/p>\n
Moving down the list, \u201cHate To See You Like This\u201d is an airy tale of trying to help a friend get their act together, a very pretty melody for a not-very-pretty subject.\u00a0 \u201cRadio Bar\u201d is a bouncy, fun number about an old favorite hangout, filled with classic rock references and lit up by the trumpet work of Ronnie Buttacavoli, who provided similar services on Traffic And Weather<\/i> and Welcome Interstate Managers<\/i>.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
The lush, pretty \u201cFirelight Waltz\u201d segues seamlessly to the closer, which gives the album its mysterious title.\u00a0 Of all the FOW tunes I\u2019ve ever referred to as elegiac, \u201cCemetery Guns\u201d earns the adjective in the most literal and moving way.\u00a0 Painting the scene of a military funeral where the 21-gun salute shoots \u201cthe sky full of holes,\u201d this track manages to be sad, sweet and clever all at once with its mellifluous rhymes and painterly references to color.\u00a0 It\u2019s unapologetically poetic, with the military cadence of the drums the perfect final touch.<\/p>\n
The playful edge of Welcome Interstate Managers<\/i> and Traffic And Weather<\/i> feels a bit muted on Sky Full Of Holes<\/i>; it\u2019s more internally consistent in style and tone, but consequently less kaleidoscopic in feel.\u00a0 As with T&W<\/i>\u2014an album that has gotten better and better with every listen over the past four years\u2014it\u2019s once again hard not to sit in anticipation of a cotton-candy pop confection on the order of \u201cStacy\u2019s Mom,\u201d and not to miss just a little bit the fact that there isn\u2019t one here.\u00a0 Still, as before, once you settle in, get to know these songs and come to appreciate their essential genius, you are reminded again of what a fluke\u2014in truth, a goofy footnote\u2014\u201cStacy\u2019s Mom\u201d really is in the career of one of the most prodigiously talented songwriting teams of their generation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":30750,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[6919],"rating":[5646],"class_list":["post-42425","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-fountains-of-wayne","rating-rating-a"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42425\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42425"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=42425"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=42425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}