Fountains of Wayne
By: Sean Slone - ModernRock.com
The Nightclub 9:30 was only about three quarters full on Saturday night, perhaps because Christmas shopping season was in full tilt. Still, it was good to see so many young people amongst the small crowd. Perhaps not all of Generation Y have deserted the pleasures of melodic, Beatles-y power pop for angry, maladjusted grunt rock.
The New York-based Fountains of Wayne, anchored by songwriters Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger, delivered those melodies in spades, along with a healthy dose of alternately plinking and swirling 80s new wave synths, crunchy rock guitar chords, and sha-la-la background vocals. They even threw in their own Christmas song to honor the season.
The band was concluding a tour that began at this very club back in July. Along the way, Fountains had tasted some radio success with the humorous and catchy songs on their latest CD Utopia Parkway, most notably "Red Dragon Tattoo," their song about going under the needle to impress a girl. "Now I look a little more like that guy from Korn," Collingwood sang. But on this night it was the songs from 1996's self-titled debut that were showcased.
New guitarist Phil Hurley displayed solid chops, nailing the parts familiar from the albums while adding his own style and harmony vocals on songs like the hard-edged "Denise" and the set closing "Survival Car," with its sugar rush of la-la-la's, guitar crunch, and shifting tempo.
Hurley put power behind the crash into the final chorus of "Leave the Biker." In that song, Collingwood sings humorously about his disbelief that a beautiful woman has taken up with this disgusting biker dude. "He's got his arm around every man's dream. Crumbs in his beard from the seafood special… Baby please leave the biker, break his heart."
The band displayed their quieter side on Parkway's "Hat and Feet" and "Troubled Times." The latter was one of Collingwood's best vocal performances of the evening. "Sick Day," the debut album's sweet song about the mundane life of a 9 to 5 office worker, was also a highlight, complete with a rotating disco ball to set the mood.
In what has become a well-known feature of Fountains shows, the band incorporated snippets of several classic rock chestnuts into their own "Radiation Vibe." The band touched on "Jet Airliner," "Sharp Dressed Man," "Hot Blooded," "Let's Go," and "Cat Scratch Fever" before lingering on a verse and chorus of an obvious influence, the Beatles' "Ticket to Ride."
For the encore, Collingwood and Schlesinger returned by themselves initially. The pair reminisced about playing cover songs at a club in western Massachusetts fifteen years earlier, as drunks tried to watch a football game on TV. They then performed a gorgeous version of Stephen Bishop's "On and On" with a dead-on vocal from Collingwood. They also pulled out their own aforementioned funny Christmas song "Man In the Santa Suit."
Following the brief acoustic sojourn, the band returned to close out the evening with the anti-suicide "She's Got A Problem," inside-jokey crunch pop song "Joe Rey" from the self-titled disc, and the psychedelic, wah-wah guitar powered "Go, Hippie" from Parkway.
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