Product Description

Fountains Of Wayne provide the essential missing link between the Raspberries and Green Day: sunny, harmony-laced choruses and pure-pop song structures with a gritty, Buzzcocks-like edge provided by distorted guitars and strident drumming.Songs like "Joe Rey" and "Barbara H". strike the perfect balance between sweetness and bite. The band, from Wayne, New Jersey, is the brainchild of vocalists/multi-instrumentalists Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger. Schlesinger was the composer of the Beatlesque title song of the film "That Thing You Do", and the songs on the band's self-titled debut (all Schlesinger/Collingwood cowrites) update that tune's amiable power-pop quite agreeably.
The frothy pop hijinks are backed up by a keen sense of humor, as on "Leave The Biker", which finds the protagonist exhorting the object of his desire to dump her bad-boy beau in favour of his nerdish cool. The gentle, poignant "She's Got A Problem" is an affecting, sympathetic ballad that recalls the granddaddy of nerd-pop, Jonathan Richman. The coup de grace comes with "Please Don't Rock Me Tonight", a clever twist on rock and roll clichesthat sounds like a sequel to the Records' classic "Starry Eyes".

Track Listing

1. Radiation Vibe
2. Sink To The Bottom
3. Joe Rey
4. She's Got A Problem
5. Survival Car
6. Barbara H
7. Sick Day
8. I've Got A Flair
9. Leave The Biker
10. You Curse At Girls
11. Please Don't Rock Me Tonight
12. Everything's Ruined

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21074 in Music
• Released on: 1997-05-26
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
Fountains of Wayne is one of the leaders of the latest in a long series of power- pop revivals. If the music sounds a lot like mid-1960s pop rock, it's no accident, for the songwriters are unabashed Mersey-beat fans. The songs on the debut album, Fountains of Wayne, take perky, '60s-like hooks and marry them to ambiguous, unnerving, '90s-like lyrics. Some songs offer an untrustworthy narrator; when the singer complains about "Joe Rey", a Eurotrash jet-setter, you wonder whether he's expressing disdain or envy and whether the song's noisy guitar energy belongs to the band or to Joe Rey. And there's something about the pent-up Mersey-beat energy and pleading vocals of "Please Don't Rock Me Tonight" that make one suspect the singer doesn't really mean what he says. Schlesinger and Collingswood are undeniably clever, but they're not afraid to rock. --Geoffrey Himes

Customer Reviews

I am still listenig to this!
This is such a great album. Taken as a whole, it is just so much fun to listen to.

He's got his arms around every man's dream, with crumbs in his beard from the seafood special
The lady in the music shop was most displeased when I deprived them of their only copy of this album back 10 years ago. I don't even remember where I heard "Radiation Vibe" for the first time, but it's been th only time I've felt compelled to to go a gig based on one song.

Imagine my joy then when the Varsity in Wolverhampton was filled with guitar pop, and tune after tune left me compelled again to go to my local record store in Selly Oak and get the CD.

(there's not many chances to say I was there at the beginning)

The songs on this album are perfect in form, proper 3 minute songs that don't leave any space to waste. "Leave The Biker" always makes me laugh, and this is an album full of wry observations of American life with a strangely British undertone.

Power Pop at it's best
Fountains Of Wayne are somewhat of an overlooked band. Recently they gained a bit of success due to Stacy's Mom and pretty much got lumped in as a novelty act due to nature of the lyrics in the song. While a catchy song, it is by no means the best Fountains Of Wayne have achieved. This album was released in '97 and it's probably one of the best pop-rock albums of the last decade.

Most of the songs are around 3 minutes in length and are bouncy cheery pop songs. Some are fairly reminiscent of Stacy's Mom, most notably Radiation Vibe and Survival Car whereas others are more mellow but still catchy and after a few listens you'll find yourself singing along.

This is how pop music should sound and it's unfortunate that they are not more popular but everyone who discovers this album will know it's true quality.