Fountains of Wayne’s tunes drip with irony

The band Fountains of Wayne fittingly opened its House of Blues concert Sunday with “Bought for a Song,” which mentions the 101 Freeway and some other Los Angeles-area specifics. It was a strong start for the group, built around the longtime team of singer Chris Collingwood and bassist Adam Schlesinger and cherished by power-pop fanatics (and boy, there are some) for its ringing guitars and shimmering harmonies.

But it’s Long Island and New Jersey life portrayed on most of the New York-based outfit’s new “Welcome Interstate Managers” album, sort of an attempt to be for that middle-class suburbia what Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town” is to the ‘70s working class of the same region.

On the album it’s a bit sterile, the music as unnaturally immaculate as a suburban lawn with not a blade out of place. Live, though, it was a little messier, especially when it leaned toward its Cheap Trick side and less to the more sugary Raspberries side.

Still, it failed to lend the subject matter the dark undercurrents that marked the treatment of similar cultural settings by, for example, the movies “The Graduate” or “American Beauty.” And such character studies as that of the eager functionary of “A Bright Future in Sales” seemed to mock, relying on ironic detachment rather than emotional connection.

The world the band knows best, though, is a musical one, a bubble in time between the end of the Beatles and the explosion of punk. In case anyone didn’t pick up on that in the group’s three albums, it digressed from the song “Radiation Vibe” for a mini-medley of hits by Kansas, Joe Walsh, the Cars and Steve Miller. So while the band may have mocked, it also rocked. Tunefully.