If Wheatus had emerged as a new band within the past few years — and not had the misfortune of arriving at the tail end of the 1990s alt-rock boom — it’d likely be right up there in the new-wave-perpetuators stratosphere with bands such as Fountains of Wayne. Instead, the coed sextet suffers the ignominious one-hit-wonder tag (thanks to the sublime, Iron Maiden-geeks-in-love ditty “Teenage Dirtbag”) and has to rename albums Suck Fony after an acrimonious record-label split. Yet somehow its cult status hasn’t soured the band’s power-synthpop sugar-rushes and subversive lyrics (“Just tell me his name/. . . Just tell me if his dick is bigger than mine”) — all of which make Fony and the band’s latest, TooSoonMonsoon, the perfect rainbow-hued remedies for the winter blahs.
This article appears in Dec 7-13, 2005.