The Story Thus Far 2011 Edition: Sky Full of Holes by Fountains of Wayne

Bruce will always have Nebraska. Bowie will always have Berlin. But Fountains of Wayne have always seemed to be perpetually stuck in suburban America. 2007's Traffic & Weather lingered on protagonists who tragically rushed through their lives without ever getting anywhere. 2003's Welcome Interstate Managers was an ode to suburbanites trapped in the cubicleland of middlemanagement hell. Sky Full of Holes, however, is a new and novel take for this band on the subject: it's the suburban disseration on mortality. Tuneful but passingly morbid, it's their rumination on life, death and all the rest. It's their own American Prayer; a reimagining in which Jim Morrison wears short sleeved button down shirts for his accounting job. It's a powerpop Automatic for the People that trades the gothic austerity of Athens, Georgia, for the simple pleasures of Jersey Shore.

Which is not to say that Sky Full of Holes is a glum affair. It's still a FOW album, after all, and nobody makes the mundane more spectacular than Fountains of Wayne. Their brilliance has always been their ability to find the humanity of a song skirted between the accelerated delivery of comedy and the nuanced languor of tragedy. Sky Full of Holes, their most straighforward effort since 1999's Utopia Parkway, has plenty of characters that offer both.

There's the hare brained losers of "Richie and Ruben," the roadsick musician of "Roadsong," and the despondent girlfriend in "Hate to See You Like This." At first glance, there aren't a lot of thoughts here on the surface that linger towards morbid fascination. But spread across the whole album, there is a a pervasive unease that comes with the realization that time is oppressively encroaching upon all of us. "Workingman's Hands" concerns itself with saving money "for a hole in the ground, a black car and a long wall of roses" while "Cold Comfort Flowers," with it's psychadelic harmonies, states it's affair much more plainly with the chorus of "cold comfort flowers will bloom and decay."

Given this newfound morbidity, it's not hard to understand the mordant ennui of the the girlfriend in "Hate to See You Like This." The haplessly bored sister of "The Summer Place" feels it, too. She daydreams about feeling half as alive as she felt when she was a shoplifting teen. The Walter Mitty-esque protagonist of "Action Hero" finds himself in the midst of a medical scare that's soon to be an existential crisis. "Cemetary Guns" is a sermon for the "blue war widow in the grey raincoat." Bloom and decay, indeed.

Lacking the Steve Miller-esque sheen of their last album or the new wave hooks that propelled "Stacy's Mom" to public consciousness, it would be all too easy to write off Sky Full of Holes as an excercise in solemnity. But FOW keep the arrangements simple and let singer Chris Collingwood's vocals do the heavy lifting. Their typical snarky flare is traded for a more subtle delivery as they let their impeccable songwriting and nuanced melodicism do all the talking. The end result is still unmistakably Fountains of Wayne: even with the softer touch and slower delivery, everybody still sings along.


essential listening:

Action Hero
Cold Comfort Flowers
Cemetary Guns
*the Story in Your Eyes (amazon exclusive)