Fountains of Wayne “Sky Full of Holes”

Lojinx 2011

Not just the best album FOW have ever recorded, but a strong contender for album of the year

• Fountains of Wayne have been around for some time now but for many people in the UK at least, “Stacy’s Mom” is the first and only thing they think of when the band’s name comes up which is a shame since it clouds the rest of their catalogue under a “geek pop” haze which isn’t a particularly authentic tag for much of their music.  Anyway, if that’s still putting you off delving into the band’s recordings then now’s the time to break free from the Stacy shackles as “Sky Full of Holes” is a huge leap forward and by some distance the best album Schlesinger, Collinger and co. have recorded.

• Having moved from Virgin over to Yep Roc in the States (and Lojinx this side of the Atlantic), the music has taken a slight shift from the variation of their more recent albums to a more cohesive guitar driven sound, and it’s all the better for it – there’s no sign of the kind of “Strapped for Cash” or even “Traffic and Weather” (the track, not the album) electronica-edged sound here, but the album doesn’t feel bland from the departure – far from it.  The stellar opening track (which every FOW album has had to be fair) makes its mark as always – “The Summer Place” sets the tone for an album that feels like one of those genuine “soundtracks for a season” (it’s almost a shame its general release isn’t a little earlier), and the album then progresses with involving stories and trademark memorable characters (including of particular note “Richie and Ruben,” businessmen who have the opposite of the midas touch).

  The lyrics often manage to be genuinely funny without seeming forced which is a real trick in music, often evoking the deadpan stylings of Loudon Wainwright or Randy Newman, but even at their driest (“some kid threw a bottle on stage, he had an arm like a pro”) they sit within the context of songs that are genuinely moving.  Both the elegiac title track and "Workingman's Hands" are crushing in their evocations of death and the slightness of life, and for all the humour, it seems to represent a genuine shift in the band on to more serious territory, perhaps a reflection  of the times.  It has to be noted too that for all the band’s flirtations with country music in the past, this is the record where the “americana” sound seems engrained into the album as a whole rather than as a one off novelty track.  While nothing matches the sheer sublimeness of “Fire in the Canyon” (in this writer’s view just about the finest country song ever written, even if it does sound a bit like the Littlest Hobo theme),  there are some really, really lovely country twinged moments here such as “A Road Song” and again “Workingman’s Hands,” the latter of which contains a guitar solo that’s so sweet you could spread it on a bagel and wolf it down.

  More generally and above all else, it’s the melodies on this album that make it a truly great record.  They soar, they sweep up and down, they swirl around your head and make their way right through your body – they’re genuinely some of the sweetest ever written, beautifully arranged and harmonised to a fault.  Listening for example to the middle acoustic section of “Someone’s Gonna Break Your Heart,” you can’t fail to be impressed with the songwriting.  The songs themselves indeed are so strong that they’d stand up in any setting – you get the feeling they will do for years to come – and for that reason it does feel genuinely like an album, if not the album, of 2011.  Oh, and nice artwork too.