It is customary, in reviewing Fountains of Wayne cd’s (Welcome Interstate Managers, released earlier this month, is their third), to wonder “How come they’re not famous pop stars already?”. There are, in my opinion, a number of excellent answers, but the fact of the question seems like a good place to start. The young men of Fountains of Wayne play hooky, forthright, catchy songs, and there’s broad agreement that they play these songs exceptionally well.

“Mexican Wine”, for example, leads off Welcome with a melody strong enough to survive a delicate verse of harpsichord, but normal enough to sound exactly correct when the warmly overdriven guitars (think Weezer's "Buddy Holly") kick in. Less wheedly than Blink 182 and benefitting from thoughtfully arranged vocal harmonies, with soft trumpet winding in the background and a few raucous chords worthy of the Who just before the end, “Mexican Wine” is a strong dose of traditionalism, easy on the ears. “Bright Future in Sales” cuts bouncy guitar-pop verses (backed by bright keyboard patches) with a double-speed version of the swaggery, propulsive riffing with which the Beatles helped found heavy metal on “Helter-Skelter” and “Birthday”. Much of “Stacy’s Mom” is a deadpan impression of Buddy Holly, the singer, fronting the Cars, down to the fake handclaps and the precision with which the percussive guitar swipes from “Just What I Needed” (which, to be clear, is a _good_ thing). By its later choruses we’re listening to a nerdy Bon Jovi, and a couple of chord transitions are tricky enough for the Beach Boy fans in the audience. This is pop, we can surely agree.

The gentle “Hackensack”, supple vocals and lite jazz-pop keyboards over a monotonous acoustic rhythm guitar, foregrounds the harmonies. It was introduced by FoW’s Adam Schesinger in their Newbury Comics cd-release show as “a song named for a New Jersey city which, for some reason, is getting huge airplay in Ireland”. “You have no idea if we just made that up”, Chris Collingwood chimed in, and I haven’t bothered to check yet, but it certainly ought to be true. “No Better Place” edges towards country-rock, but with their most complicated melody yet, and with a couple of agressively weird, echoplexed guitar-effect hooks. (Boston-rock fans can applaud the presence of Jen Trynin on backup vocals.) The gentle “Valley Winter Song” is like Simon and Garfunkel with sterling modern production, agile guitar playing, and attractively plaintive pedal-steel keening. “All Kinds of Time” builds from folk-country into a dreamy, tremolo-heavy version of rock. But then “Little Red Light” chugs along on fast thick rhythm guitar, New Wave synth hooks, sing-song verse, and off-balance but uplifting chorus, and yes, this too could have topped a chart or three. Better this than Good Charlotte or Sum 41, and I don’t mind Good Charlotte or Sum 41. “Hey Julie”’s clean acoustic strums, maracas-and-washboard percussion, and soft electric organ would be a third- or fourth-single type of hit, crossover for the people who find even Weezer levels of distortion to get obnoxious after awhile.

The rest of the album stretches out in genre without ever being frightening. “Halley’s Waitress” is a somewhat whiter version of Stevie Wonder or Seal, “Hung Up on You” is twangy country, “Fire Island” is piano and strumming and earnest singing with several adventurous chord changes. “Peace and Love” sounds like a smarmy mockery of Herman’s Hermits, but “Bought for a Song” could be one of those Ben Folds songs where I can’t doubt Ben’s word that Elton John was a big influence (the synthesized noises and trumpet in the background are also nice). “Supercollider”, distended and wobbly, is psychedelic country-rock. And “Yours and Mine” finishes the album with its simplest track: acoustic rhythm guitar, solo voice, woodblock, harmonica, one minute and out. For people friendly to western pop traditions, there is little or nothing in the music to dislike, and lots to sing along with.

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It’s pop’s endorsement of “singing along with”, I think, that gives Welcome Interstate Managers a bad aftertaste for me. It is commonly asserted, by Fountains of Wayne’s fans, that their lyrics are smart and clever, and while I’m sure those weren’t the terms their classmates used when dunking the Wayneos’ heads in the school toilets, I’m equally sure those classmates would accept “smart and clever” as true assessments. It’s cunning to summarize an entire career in the AAAA quatrain “I used to fly for United Airlines/ then I got fired for reading High Times/ my license expired in almost no time/ now I’m retired and I think that’s fine”. It’s cute to write a song of lust for a girlfriend’s mom, and they capture a certain oblivious pathos as the narrator asks “Stacey do you remember when I mowed your lawn?/ your Mom came out with just a towel on/ I could tell she liked me from the way she stared/ and the way she said ‘You missed a spot over there’”. It’s right and fair to notice a prior lack of songs about the feeling of a young quarterback realizing a play is about to go perfectly, or about being stuck in traffic, radio broken, late for an office meeting. “Ever since you hung up on me, I’m hung up on you” is a perfect country-music tagline for their country song. It’s a novelty for a chorus going “It’s been so long, so long/ darling don’t you know, we miss you when you’re gone” to be about waiting for a waitress to reappear... though it would be more novel if I didn’t already know two songs called “Waitress” that explicitly call the waitress a biitch, versus only one song (Jane Siberry’s) from a waitress’s perspective, and none treating a waitress with respect and large tips.

The thing I find grating is that the clevernesses add up in ways I’m not liking. Start with the sea of tuxedoed, vacuous, middle-aged white men on the cover, as impersonal as H.R. Giger’s “Penis Landscape”, and the obviously sarcastic album title. Follow with a song that makes fun of two random strange deaths, and a song where the narrator, talking of his “bright future in sales”, is an obnoxious drunken idiot. “Stacy’s Mom” and “Hackensack” could be seen as romantic, but they could also be seen as pathetic and self-deluded, and a bit later we’ve got whiny office boy whose romantic longing they choose to phrase as “the little red light’s not blinking on my big black plastic Japanese cordless phone”. “Hey Julie” could be romantic again, but “I’d never make it without you around” gets less time than “a mean little man with a clip-on tie and a rub-on tan”, “pointless calls”, “a desk full of paper that means nothing at all”, “running round the office like a gerbil on a wheel”. Waitresses are inadequately servile, hippies are stupid, construction workers are on drugs. The album ends with this pledge of devotion: “Picking up the paper, coffee’s been made/ it’s Book Review and Face the Nation time/ two in the same mind/ yours and mine”. It’s forgivably weird if sincere, but I suspect it’s another sarcastic character sketch.

And the problem is that all the negative or potentially-negative character sketches are of people whom Fountains of Wayne – slovenly paleface geeks the four of them – are emphatically not. This isn’t They Might Be Giants interrupting their wordplay to create losers (“Why Must I Be Sad?”, “Doctor Worm”, “How Can I Sing Like a Girl?”) with rich inner lives, an alert fear of the outside world, and a distinct resemblance to TMBG’s own fanbase. This isn’t Kurt Cobain loathing himself as much he loathes you. This isn't Al Yankovic basing every pop-culture joke around him having no life at all. The problem with Welcome Interstate Managers is that for me, at least, it’s hard not to start hearing the metamessage “everyone is tacky except us”, and I don’t want to sing along with that. I’m pro-hippie, dammit. I’m anti-corporate-bureacracy, but I’ve temped a lot of office jobs (started a new one Wednesday in fact), and very few of my co-workers have been contemptible, nor have all the nice ones been miserable. I’m anti-automobile, anti-drunkenness, and in some cases anti-cellphone, but I’d hope my reasons are practical and/or moral, while their reasons seem to stop at “look at _those_ dorks”.

Maybe I totally misunderstand. If you’re going to buy your first Fountains of Wayne album, I’d recommend their 1999 release Utopia Parkway (a much more ambivalent and poignant title), and I didn’t get the same vibes from that one – though I have friends who did. The Newbury Comics show, performed as an acoustic duo of Adam and Chris, didn’t feature “Bright Future in Sales” or “Little Red Light” or “Halley’s Waitress” or “Peace and Love” or “Bought for a Song”, Welcome’s openly mocking tracks, and didn’t (obviously) have the frequently glam production. The close harmonies were being navigated in front of us, with visible co-operation and errors, and they even led off with my favorite song of theirs, Utopia’s “Red Dragon Tattoo”. “Red Dragon Tattoo”’s narrator has even less chance of scoring than that of “Stacy’s Mom”, but his journey to get the tattoo is much more richly and humanly detailed, and there’s a desperate self-awareness to the question “Will you stop pretending I’ve never been born/ now I look a little more like that guy from Korn?”. Logically, it’s unlikely that the tens of thousands of units shifted of Utopia Parkway have been enough to turn the Wayneos suddenly callous. I don’t want to be wrong about their prior album, so logically I should accept that I’m wrong to doubt this one.

But if I’m not comfy singing along with these songs yet, what are the odds that a nation will which, in general, admires football players, respects money-making talent, sees nothing wrong with drinking a lot, and has a deep suspicion of smartypantses? This is a nation where presidential candidates, of all people, are attacked if they think they’re smarter than we are – thus father and son Bush instead (possibly they're bright, but if so they don’t rub it in). It doesn’t take any fancy explanation to answer “Why aren’t Fountains of Wayne stars?”, of course; in fact, it’s a silly question to ask about any act that doesn’t have an expensive major-label promotional campaign behind it, because rising to attention is a fairly random process. My four favorite albums from 2000 to the present have combined sales less than Welcome Interstate Managers will have by the end of this summer; there’s too many albums competing for attention, and that’s how it goes. But if “Stacey’s Mom” emerges as a fluke hit – which it certainly could – I predict this: that the people who buy the album will find themselves displeased with it, and warn their friends away. You’re allowed, in America, to have a bad attitude. But you’re not allowed to base it around your God-given intelligence. And quite honestly, if that and a remarkable gift for melody are the end-all of what you have, I’m not sure you should.

Recommended: Yes