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by Dan Grote
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Finally, an album for the quarter-life crisis! Fountains of Wayne's third album, Welcome Interstate Managers, is a tour-de-force of pop songs about people between the ages of 22 and 32 living lives of quiet desperation. Each of the album's 16 songs about all-growed-up-now Generation X seems inherently designed to bring a smirk to the face or a tear to the eye, and there's not an uncatchy ditty in the bunch.

Fountains of Wayne first arrived on the scene in late 1996, when the death knell of the alternative era was briefly postponed by a cadre of pop-rock bands that were determined to get their last, navel-gazing kicks in, such as Sebadoh, Geggy Tah, Local H, the Fountains themselves, and, to a lesser extent, Weezer, whose Pinkerton became a cult classic of that era. The Fountains themselves scored a hit with the song "Radiation Vibe," and later went on to release a second album, Utopia Parkway, that was largely (and some say unfairly) ignored.

This time around, however, the band can't lose, especially with rockers like "Bright Future in Sales," about a hard-partying self-motivator who spends the length of the song promising to "get my s*** together." Then there is the new New Wave masterpiece, "Stacy's Mom," a song of taboo lust unparalleled since the Cars' "My Best Friend's Girl," and featuring one of the album's funnest lyrical moments: "Stacy, remember that time when I mowed your lawn/Your mom came out with just a towel on."

Stylistically, the band's music often matches the subject matter, switching up sounds for "Halley's Waitress," about getting bad service from a diner waitress with big time dreams, set to the sounds of bad diner muzak with words. Then there's "Hung up on You," an "I love you more because you hate me more" song set to country music.

Perhaps the album's best moments though are its slowest. One can't help but be moved by "All Kinds of Time," about a football player who finds peace in a career-ending injury. You try and not think about maybe crying when the song's protagonist thinks about his dad and brothers watching him on TV from the home he misses so much. Also wonderfully bittersweet is "Fire Island," about two kids who convince their parents they can take care of themselves while the parents go on vacation, secretly planning all the innocent hell they're going to raise, i.e. driving the car on the lawn, jumping on the couch until the feathers fly out, and all the other twelve-year-old antics you can think of.

VERDICT: Maybe, just maybe, the album didn't need to be 16 tracks long. But there's so much quality on Welcome that most people really might not want the album to end anyway. This is perfect music for the morning commute, like one big "hang in there" poster without that annoying kitten hanging on the branch.