It's been a golden year for pop fanatics, with stellar debuts from Jason Faulkner, Brendan Benson, and now New York's Fountains of Wayne. Listening to the duo's premiere effort is like sinking your teeth into an orange Starburst: it's a full-on sugar rush, replete with gooey hooks, sunny melodies, guitars that go crunch in all the right places, and Evan Dando-style vocalizing from Chris Collingwood. It's nothing we haven't heard a thousand times before, but who cares? Beyond the edgy, swinging delight of songs like "Sink to the Bottom," with its now-clichéd Nirvana-like chorus, the band possesses a songwriting knack that's brilliant, if infuriatingly erratic. F.O.W. principals Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger (who penned the cloying "That Thing You Do!" for the Tom Hanks film) can create poignant three-minute melodramas like 73 "She's Got a Problem"--a downer in the tradition of J. Frank Wilson's classic of morbidity, "Last Kiss"--and the wistful "Sick Day," a quiet, melancholy ode to the loneliness of everyday life, reminiscent of the Hollies' "Bus Stop." At the same time, they crank out alternapop space fillers like "Joey Rey" and "I've Got a Flair." They can even balance both styles, as on "Leave the Biker" and "Please Don't Rock Me Tonight." This is perfectly crafted irreverence that's 100% fun. --Erik Himmelsbach