Fountains of Wayne: Drive-time Players

It's one of the odd ironies of the post-punk decades in America that bands and artists who fit one of the more common definitions of pop -- the dBs in the '80s or the Posies in the '90s -- never really manage to be very popular. Fountains of Wayne, who came to the Paradise last Saturday, have been on the verge of being an exception to that rule since the release of their homonymous Atlantic debut in 1996, a disc that featured the beaming sing-along near-hit "Radiation Vibe" and at least three or four more tracks that were just as ready for drive-time play. The band's new Utopia Parkway (Atlantic), which dropped this spring, is proof that the first one was no fluke -- that singer/guitarist Chris Collingwood and bassist Adam Schlesinger (who's also a member of the NYC trio Ivy) simply have a way with the three-minute verse/chorus/verse form, not to mention a gift for the ever-elusive bridge that usually sneaks in somewhere around minute two. And, joined on stage by FOW guitarist Jody Porter, former Posies drummer Brian Young, and a keyboard player hired for the tour, they unassumingly tore through a dozen-and-a-half-tune set that made it look way too easy.

They opened, appropriately enough, with Utopia Parkway's "It Must Be Summer," a driving tune about a guy whose car won't start, an anti-summer summer song that singles out a couple of seasonal landmarks for good measure -- the Jersey Shore and the Long Island Sound. And they spent the first half of the set working their way through a good chunk of the new disc -- the melancholy "Hat and Feet," with its Looney Tunes image of a guy reduced to a spot on the sidewalk by a falling piano; the overdriven "Denise," about a gravel-hearted girl who "drives a lavender Lexus/She lives in Queens but her dad lives in Texas"; and the wry single "Red Dragon Tattoo," which name-checks Korn, .38 Special, Basil Hayden bourbon, and Easy Rider on its way to a clever "fit to be dyed" chorus.

By the end of the set, Fountains of Wayne had loosened up enough to indulge in some amusing jukebox heroics: midway through a "Radiation Vibe" that had the Paradise crowd shouting along, after a quick on-stage conference, the band segued first into a verse and a chorus of the Cars' "Let's Go" and then into Steve Miller's "Jet Airliner." With the encore came more familiar covers -- including Miller's "Rock 'N Me" -- but the point had already been made: great pop songs yearn to be popular.

-- Matt Ashare