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As with previous Fountains efforts like 2003's Welcome Interstate Managers or 1999's Utopia Parkway, there's nothing much challenging about the music on Traffic and Weather, which bounces between well-executed teen-movie power pop and shuffling acoustic ballads. But the songs also continue to excel at making a great something out of nothing. Shaping the flavorless dough of unremarkable power-chord rock and the trials of Gap shoppers, the record's pinhole-view on a diorama of routine lives gives them believable depth. Whether we sit beside these folks while they wait for luggage ("Michael and Heather at the Baggage Claim"), hear instructions from airline attendants ("Seatbacks and Tray Tables"), or make tedious drives ("I-95"), the left-bent, middle-class everymen in these songs are consistently disarming. Even when the commonplace life lessons get ham-fisted—as on the chugging title track about love infiltrating the Channel 6 News Team, or the Thin Lizzy rocker " '92 Subaru"—Collingwood's sharp wordplay lets him off the hook. Back behind that counter at the DMV, Yolanda Hayes looks like a real-life angel, florescent lights and all.

Fountains of Wayne play Webster Hall April 24, websterhall.com