Tag Archives: pop

Music reviews

Listening to…

Fountains of Wayne, “Someone’s Gonna Break Your Heart” and “Richie and Ruben”

Fountains of Wayne, a band I’ve followed slavishly from their earliest days, has signed to the Yep Roc label and has a full album due later this summer. A single’s been released on iTunes and elsewhere. For better or worse, it’s classic FoW: the matter-of-fact false-confident-sensitive-guy advisory “Someone’s Gonna Break Your Heart and the character study “Richie and Ruben” (about pesky guys with big ideas who blow through their patron’s investments). The production is on the same pure-pop level the band has maintained since “Radiation Vibe” a decade and a half ago. “Someone’s” has the big choral doo-doo-doos while “R&R” has the patented laidback Fountains jangle. Expectations run high for the full album, the band’s first in a few years and one which should find them out of the shadow of their freak video-fueled mainstream hit “Stacy’s Mom.”

Food & Drink

Am I Blue?

The only disappointment in my trip to L.A. was the lack of interesting local brands of soda pop. I’d been told about a specialty soda pop shop that has brands from all over the country, but didn’t make it there. What I wanted was variety at the corner shops.
There is an upscale convenience store chain out West called Famima, which carries cultier foods. That’s where I rediscovered an elixir of my youth, Frostie Blue Cream Soda.
This is not a California carbonated delicacy. Not does it hail from the Antarctic, as its label might lead you to believe. Frostie Blue Cream Soda is, as its label attests, “a registered trademark of Frostie Root Beer LLC.” Before the Michigan-based Intrastate Distributors took it over a couple of years ago, the brand was owned by beverage companies in Texas, Georgia and Maryland
As blue as the antifreeze in a new Motortown automobile, Frostie Blue Cream Soda may not local to L.A., but neither is it local to accustomed carbonated beverage guzzling climes of Connecticut. It felt exotic enough that for the last three or four days of my trip, Frostie Blue Cream was just about all I drank.
P.S. That watermelon one, not so good.