"Utopia Parkway," the second album of just-about-perfect pop songs from Fountains of Wayne, wears its melancholy lightly, like a windbreaker. Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood, who write all the band's material, are smart lyricists who also seem exceptionally secure. There's no desperation in their cleverness, no hint of tab-A-into-slot-B methodology in their rhyme schemes. "Sick Day," one of the most moving songs on their first, self-titled LP, sketches a picture of working girls on their way to the office en masse, crossing under the harbor tunnel in their cars and on public transportation, their workaday ennui both a source of weird electricity and a badge of solidarity: "They're all chewing gum and laughing at the voice on the crackling radio station/lead us not into Penn Station, 'cause the best part's just begun." Schlesinger and Collingwood know how to slip a complex lyric into a compact musical phrase and make it sound perfectly natural, in the tradition of the best Burt Bacharach and Hal David collaborations, and their smudgy, saffron-hued harmonies add extra layers of depth.

The songs on "Utopia Parkway" follow in a similar vein, but if anything they're even more imaginative melodically, and they sound richer. Schlesinger and Collingwood, who played and sang everything themselves on the first LP with the help of a tiny handful of supporting musicians, are now the core of a proper band, having added Jody Porter on guitar and Brian Young on drums. The new blood probably accounts for the more varied textures here. The guitars in particular (played by Porter, Collingwood and Schlesinger) roam wild and free across the range -- there's no discernible unifying guitar "sound" on "Utopia Parkway," but that means there's no room for boredom, either. The guitars are lanky and slope-shouldered (yet absolutely confident) on the hesitantly optimistic title track, feral and guttural on "The Valley of Malls," with phrases spun out like epitaphs read off a row of tombstones.

And thematically, Fountains of Wayne's songs are even harder to nail down. Sometimes even good pop songs practically provide you with an X-ray view of how they were written: Someone came up with an intriguing concept or phrase, matched it up with a riff that magically emerged while fooling around, and eureka -- a song is born. But Collingwood and Schlesinger are a breed apart, two songwriters you can never see right through. It's as if their songs have been grown, not built, from the inside out -- they change shape as you listen to them. "Red Dragon Tattoo," sung from the point of view of a guy who's still stinging from the needle, measures the length to which a guy will go to impress a girl: "Red dragoon tattoo is just about on me/I got it for you, so now do you want me?" Collingwood -- Fountains of Wayne's lead singer -- asks the question with a mix of defiance and timidity, but for all the self-doubt in the lyrics ("I'm fit to be dyed, am I fit to have you?"), there's also a kind of triumph built into the hand-claps and the chugging self-assurance of the guitars. The deed is done, whether she'll have him or not -- but wouldn't it be nice if she came around?

Fountains of Wayne never take their wit too seriously, yet they never throw it around casually, either. Looking at the words to "Prom Theme" -- an elegy for that mythical "last night" in every American teenager's life -- you might think Collingwood and Schlesinger are just being smart alecks: "We'll pass out on the beach/Our keys just out of reach/And soon we'll say goodbye/Then we'll work until we die." But Collingwood sings that last line without even a glimmer of irony, recognizing that it's somewhat true, but not really, and moving on. It's the chorus that captures the real heartache of the song: "But tonight we feel like we're stars/We'll play our air guitars." "Prom Theme" isn't laden with nostalgia, nor does it brutally tell it like it is (who needs a song like that?). Collingwood and Schlesinger have draped its mournful melody in strings -- in terms of its sound and mood, it really could be a prom theme -- yet it stops far short of being cloying. "Prom Theme" doesn't pull out all the cheap tricks, conjuring memories of bad dresses and clinging to your date during that goddamn "Stairway to Heaven." Instead, it breaks the whole experience down to its most essential elements. Most of us couldn't have cared less about "Stairway to Heaven"; it was the clinging that meant the world.

As good as they are at writing lyrics, Fountains of Wayne know how to do something that's far more difficult: tell a story with music. "It Must Be Summer" -- in which a guy goes out looking for his girl and can't find her anywhere -- plays Beach Boys exuberance against the crushing disappointment you hear in Sinatra's "Summer Wind." "Hat and Feet" riffs on a cartoon image -- the unwitting bloke who's been flattened by a falling anvil or piano -- but in this case it's a girl's cruel heart that's done the damage. The guitars, wrought into acoustic question marks, seem to wonder aloud, "How could I have let this happen?" It's a sweet little song, so gentle and rounded in its perfection, that only when it's over do you realize that it's also taken something out of you. It's just a little death, and it hardly hurts at all.
salon.com | April 13, 1999

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