Fountains Of Wayne, Traffic And Weather

by Stephanie Allerdice
09/07/2007

After two years of silence pop group, Fountains of Wayne has cut another record. They should have remained quiet.

The band that formed in 1996 hit it big in 2003 with their silly single “Stacy’s Mom.” And since then they made a niche for themselves singing sardonic pop songs including a cover of Britney Spears’ “...Baby One More Time.”

On their most recent album, Traffic and Weather, Fountains of Wayne attempts to bust out of their comfort zone and break new ground. The problem with that is they just end up copying bands that they can never live up to.

The lyrics rely too much on product and pop culture references. There are four in the first song, “Someone to Love,” which is basically an Eleanor Rigby rip-off. There are probably more than 20 allusions on the whole album, including entire songs about Subarus and the DMV. It makes one wonder if they are getting paid for these endorsements.

The title track, “Traffic and Weather,” is an extended simile about how two people go together like the Traffic and Weather reports on the news. This song is apparently where romance goes to die.

In their two attempts to be sincere, “Michael and Heather At The Baggage Claim,” and “I-95,” they end up falling short of actually making a worthwhile song. But both will probably enjoy a long run on the high school dance circuit.

The founding duo, Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger, stay true to form in that they are trying to tell a story in each song, but their storytelling is increasingly formulaic. Each song starts with a random time and a random name of a person who is doing something that is actually a metaphor for something else. In their struggle to create something meaningful, they just sound thin.

The music is pretty much all stolen. Sure, they throw in some random banjo and trumpet in an effort to spice up the otherwise weary riffs and exhausted backbeats. But banjo isn’t enough to save the songs from being uninteresting at best and mind-numbing at worst.

All bands steal from other bands. But when you sample you take melody that’s already been done and then you improve on it. Traffic And Weather takes other people’s music and makes it worse. It’s never a good idea to copy something you can’t build on. BY all means, refer to other music, but do not rely on it.