It speaks volumes both about the economy and the modern music scene that the band Fountains of Wayne has, with their fifth album Sky Full Of Holes, officially outlived its namesake, an outdoor furnishings store in Wayne, New Jersey (it closed in 2009). At a recent sold-out show at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, New Jersey, the crowd was less dad-rock and more wrinkling-uncle rock, and singer Chris Collingwood (once blond, now white-haired) struggled to hit the old highest notes in his register; but his and cofounder Adam Schlesinger’s little college project, despite still being known as “That ‘Stacey’s Mom’ Band,” deliver another album of sweet yearning with a tinge of middle-aged regret.
Sky Full Of Holes alternates between “story” songs and catchy-for-catchy’s-sake tunes. In a departure from 2007’s Traffic And Weather, which pushed Cars comparisons to a cold synthy extreme, many of Collingwood and Schlesinger’s new tunes display empathy for their lovelorn or hapless subjects: The singer of “Acela” whiles away his time on the train as he realizes his girlfriend hasn’t boarded, the knuckleheads in “Richie and Ruben” continue to aggressively pursue failure, and the Joni Mitchell plaintiveness of “Action Hero” is a paean to the ordinary suburban dad. At the same time, Collingwood and Schlesinger are less tentative about dipping into new genres with the country-inflected ballads “Firelight Waltz” and “Cemetery Guns” (with its arresting portrait of “the blue war widow in the green raincoat” at a military funeral). “Radio Bar” and “Road Song” even draw on the band’s own history to scratch that nostalgic itch, with their chronicles of West Village bartop songwriting and the drudgery of life on tour. Even in its sweetness it’s still not the same as the driving “Welcome Interstate Managers,” but in the end, staying together isn’t all that bad.
