Sky Full of Holes

As I look over my review of Fountains of Wayne's last album, Traffic and Weather, from four years ago, I could make many of the same statements. Again their songs are snippets of life from middle-class American life. "Acela" is perhaps the most typical, a song about a commuter train. But I liked Sky Full of Holes more than Traffic and Weather--I think it has more emotional resonance, and any group that can effortlessly rhyme Cracker Barrel and Will Ferrell has it going on, as far as I'm concerned.

There are the usual FOW touches. The first line from the first song, "The Summer Place," is "She's been afraid of the Cuisinart since 1977." There's a certain element of nostalgia for a certain kind of life, as referenced in the song "Radio Bar," where Steve Miller's "The Joker" is playing over and over again. "Action Hero," about a hapless suburban man who longs to be a super-hero, reminds me of Elton John's "Roy Rogers," and "A Road Song," about the travails of a band on the road, seems more personal than FOW's other work.

But I think the song that gives this album an extra bit of greatness is the last cut, "Cemetery Guns." On the surface it's kind of sappy, about a military funeral, but it departs from FOW's standard issue template and after multiple listens I liked it more each time. The lines, "Cemetery guns go bang, bang, bang, shooting all the sky full of holes, twenty-one times in a row, for the blue war widow in the gray raincoat and the green grass down below." Call me sentimental, but that gets to me.

Of FOW's five albums, I'd put this either third or fourth. Utopia Parkway remains their masterpiece, but even the worst FOW album is better than most of the stuff I listen to these days.