Easy does it

Fountains of Wayne: a new Weezer?

by Matt Ashare

"Let's face it, it's easy to sing along and it sticks in your head." Demonstrating an impressive command of the obvious, and summing up a big slice of rock's pop history in one short sentence, Matt Pinfield, host of MTV's 120 Minutes alternative-rock video show, explained the beginnings of the Weezer phenomenon to Billboard two years ago. It's a statement that could just as easily apply to a new homonymously titled debut by Fountains of Wayne (TAG/Atlantic), a NYC-based duo who're poised to out-Weezer Weezer in this season's pop sweepstakes. Weezer are back too, with their amusingly titled sophomore effort Pinkerton (DGC). Both discs were released within a week of one another, October 1 and September 24, respectively. And both just happen to have self-depreciating tunes that unabashedly, and humorously, undercut rock's tradition of the untamed male libido. Weezer's "Tired of Sex" is self-explanatory. Fountains of Wayne's "Please Don't Rock Me Tonight" is an only slightly more veiled warning not to, as Robert Plant once put it, squeeze the singer's lemon and make the juice run down his leg. But FOW's is definitely the one with the stickier hooks and a melody that just won't leave you alone.

Fountains of Wayne was mixed by Chris Shaw, who also engineered Weezer's debut. Either he has a knack for signing on to projects that end up artfully anchoring twee vocal melodies in a thick and gooey undercurrent of muscular, buzzing guitars, or he's in on the scam. Either way, Fountains of Wayne certainly has that Weezer sound, and they definitely know how to use it, even if being from NYC instead of LA gives them a different point of reference. Weezer's Beach-Boys-on-overdrive anthem "Surf Wax America" was about surfing. Fountains of Wayne's East Coast answer, "Survival Car," revs Brian Wilson's "Little Deuce Coupe" up into a pop-punk reverie about off-roading in Central Park that's almost criminally catchy. And Fountains of Wayne (singer/guitarist Chris Collingwood and drummer/guitarist/singer Adam Schlesinger) share River Cuomo's knack for mining the classic nerd-pop sources, from Buddy Holly to the Beach Boys to the Ramones, without digging themselves in to a retro rut.

Unfortunately Cuomo, Weezer's songwriting savant, falls into a different sort of trap on Pinkerton -- chronic self-indulgence. Cuomo seems to have taken the success of his lovelorn ditty "Undone -- the Sweater Song" as encouragement to explore the finer points of romantic ennui. As he writes in the press release DGC sent out with the new disc, "As a whole, the album kind of tells the story of the last 2-1/2 years of my `love'-life and of my struggles with the shadier portion of my masculine side." By shady, Cuomo probably means the unhealthy crush he developed on an 18-year-old female author of a fan letter from Japan, which he recounts in "Across the Sea," and the lesbian woman he tried to pick up who provides the inspiration for "Pink Triangle" ("I'm dumb, she's a lesbian/I thought I had found the one/We were good as married in my mind/But married in my mind's no good," goes the sing-along chorus).

Maybe Cuomo didn't realize that what made downcast tunes like "Undone" and "Say It Ain't So" work so well the first time around was that, despite the tone of the lyrics, he and the rest of the band sounded as if they were having a great time bashing the songs around anyway. Pinkerton is by no means a joyless disc, but it's less fun than their debut. The hooks also aren't nearly as sharp or frequent. Weezer was like the '90s version of the Cars first album -- a tour de force of classic hits. (It was even produced by Ric Ocasek.) Pinkerton is more like Candy-O, a respectable but less compelling follow-up.

Matt Pinfield obviously wasn't the only one capable of unlocking the secret to Weezer's appeal two years ago: each and every last measure of music had a hook to hang it on. It's a simple equation: hooks + melody = hits. Add a little personality to the mix -- Weezer's Buddy-Holly-meets-new-wave charm, Presidents of the United States of America's attention-deficit-disordered horseplay, or Nada Surf's after-school-special nerdiness -- and you may just have a novelty sensation on your hands. Weezer did it in '94, Presidents of the USA in '95. Fountains of Wayne seem like a good bet in '96.