Think of Out-of-State Plates as a garage-sale effort: Fountains of Wayne rummaged through closets and drawers and came up with about 28 tracks they'd either forgotten about or outgrown, then they put them out for sale. Arrayed on the band's driveway among the piles of National Geographic back issues, that box of old shoes (all left feet, all size 14), and that collection of beer cozies are all the cuts that didn't fit on their three studio albums: the B-sides, oddball covers (ELO! Britney Spears! Burt Bacharach!), fan-only holiday songs, live tracks, even some radio spots. In other words, Out-of-State Plates isn't supposed to be a real album; instead, playing off the commercial success of "Stacy's Mom", it's supposed to be mindlessly fun, produce a summer radio single ("Maureen"), and keep the band as close as possible to the forefront of the collective pop-culture conscious.
If Out-of-State Plates is about as revelatory as your typical garage sale, it's not because these are necessarily bad songs (except for their lamentable cover of "...Baby One More Time")-- it's just that most of them seem somehow defective, one element overpower-popping the others. The bop-bop-ba's that anchor "Janice's Party" are more annoying than infectious, revealing how close to whiny Chris Collingwood can come without truly whining. Others try much too hard, with hooks that wheedle their way into your cranium with a carsalesmanly overenthusiasm ("Elevator Up"), and just to switch things up, a few don't try hard enough ("Kid Gloves"). Cumbersome concepts overburden the novelty of "Karpet King", "California Sex Lawyer", "Half a Woman", and the suite of holiday-themed songs, so that they get tangled in their own shoelaces and stumble nowhere in particular. "Comedienne" egregiously tries to cast an Elaine Boosler wannabe as a tragic heroine, but to no real avail, although the phrase "is she killing or dying" is a nice twist.
Fortunately, that humor and wordplay (which reflects the band's debt to country music punnage) does manage to provide a couple of rare bright spots over the course of the compilation's two discs. "Maureen", about a friendgirl with overshare issues, makes a nice opener (and a far better single than "Stacy's Mom"), although if I were cynical I might say the verse about how good the title character looks in a bikini was written expressly for video treatment. Even better is "The Girl I Can't Forget", a song whose alcoholic regret ("It's the night I can't remember...") is goofily tempered by the shock of having it all work out in the end ("...with the girl I can't forget").
The best material here, however, falls to a pair of songs about clever guys dating dumb girls: On "Baby I've Changed" a guy begs for forgiveness and promises not to grumble anymore when she wants to hear Sugar Ray, and on "I'll Do the Driving", over a pulsing kickdrum rhythm, perhaps the very same guy contemplates his hazy future with a girl who "has a soft spot for cops who are robots." The songs would sound mean-spirited were it not for the narrators' off-guard surprise at falling for girls who love "When It's Over" and don't know the difference between the Stones and Johnny Cash.
While these two lovestruck-dumb doofuses prove there is an intelligent and mischievous personality behind these songs, by commenting on each other's song they also reveal what is perhaps the chief deficiency of Out-of-State Plates: Each of Fountains of Wayne's three albums has its own particular personality, which raises the songs above the status of mere novelty, but Out-of-State Plates, by definition, has none. Its rummaged organization precludes the sort of niceties that benefit their records-- structure, atmosphere, setting, characters, stories, and on and on. As a result, there's no cumulative effect here, which perhaps for some listeners is the attraction: the chance to hear these songs completely divorced of any larger context-- to hear each of them as sovereign singles-- promises another discovery like "Radiation Vibe" or "Denise". However, this means every song stands alone, even though only a few hold up to that kind of serious-shopper scrutiny.
