Wheatus

Too Soon Monsoon

(Montauk Mantis)

Record Review by Adam McKibbin

There was a time when Fountains of Wayne carried some serious cachet in certain circles outside the mainstream, making sunny day pop music that didn’t get much airplay and, thus, presumably qualified as a proud pleasure instead of a guilty pleasure.  Then came the atrocious and ubiquitous “Stacy’s Mom,” the subsequent Dr. Pepper commercial, and now Fountains of Wayne find themselves in the vicinity of Five For Fighting on the cool scale.

For Wheatus, success and the ubiquitous song (“Teenage Dirtbag”) came early, and now they find themselves trying to work backwards, losing the platinum sales but strengthening their niche audience and indie cred, a la Nada Surf.  They aren’t as user-friendly as FoW, but occupy a similar sphere of high energy and cheery melodies.  Frontman Brendan B. Brown has a pinched singing style that is a strange mixture of bratty whine and fragile tremble, although at times he does sound a little too much like a popped-up version of Coheed & Cambria’s excruciating-in-large-doses Claudio Sanchez.  Instead of sci-fi wankery, though, the focus on Too Soon Monsoon stays on the usual suspects:  relationships, the ever-changing world, and, if there is a dead horse in the Wheatus catalog, the treachery of the music industry.

The band is clearly best served by the first topic, churning out fuzzy and friendly riffs while Brown waxes nostalgic.  Nostalgia is a friend of his, and he employs it well (aside from the emotional flatline of the 9/11-invoking “Hometown”).  “BMX Bandits” is Wheatus and Brown at their best—the former cranking out snappy vocal harmonies and sugar-rush melodies, the latter using very specific lyrics to shape a song with a universal feel.  “The London Sun” continues on with the instant accessibility, with a chorus that is among the most contagious on the record.

“The London Sun” also brings up, however, one of Too Soon Monsoon’s flaws:  the production.  For that track, the organ is given distracting prominence.  More generally, the homegrown production aesthetic doesn’t always fit with the band’s arrangements.  The one shift that definitely works, and works well, is the attention to backing vocals [provided by Kathryn E. Froggatt and Elizabeth G. Brown].

Wheatus got kicked around a bit by the Biz, and, even if it’s a relatively common sight these days, it’s always a welcome sight to see a band kicking back.  Inescapably, though, there are benefits to having the devil in the corner.  Suits can suck the soul out of your music, sure, but they can also occasionally provide a helpful pointer or two—stuff like “Do you really need the organ up that high?” and “If you use that doodle as your cover art, we’re not sending the record out to stores.”  They are no doubt glad to be rid of the ties that bind, but Brown & Co. could still benefit from a few extra sets of ears (or hands on the knobs).