Fastball – Keep Your Wig On

Ah, yes…Fastball…you remember their sadly typical rise-and-fall story, right? Out-of-nowhere pop-rock hitmakers with the wondrous “The Way”, from the 1998 album, All The Pain Money Can Buy. The epitome of lightning caught. Then the follow-up two years later, The Harsh Light Of Day, that was the proverbial sound of a tree falling in the forest with no one ’round to hear it. Album sales plummet and major-label brass no longer has a use for them. Off to oblivion with you.

Usually, you never hear from such artists again, or they wither away trying to rekindle the nearly-impossible-to-rekindle magic that took them to the top that one time. But here’s where Fastball’s story diverges from the expected. The Austin trio chose instead to redirect its energy — one shrouded in bitterness and near-dissolution — for a rebirth of sorts. It’s called Keep Your Wig On.

Its first album in four years (not counting an under-the-radar live disc), Keep Your Wig On is everything you might expect from Fastball — crafty, Beatlesque power-pop with a smidgen of rootsy rollick. The difference: They’ve already got the Benjamins, and they’re beyond the scope of commercial radio, so the devil be damned this time out.

Thus, here is a band focused, free of its baggage and on top of its game, delivering sublime hook after sublime hook, be it on co-frontman Tony Scalzo’s frisky rock workouts and occasional white-boy R&B trips, or counterpart Miles Zuniga’s frequently more pensive pop stylings.

Gone is the chart-pimping modern-rock sheen and trickery requisite to its past efforts. No, Keep Your Wig On is about delivering honest music for all the right reasons (or so we hope). Start to finish, it’s as good as anything Fastball has ever done, if not better, and without any concern for pleasing the man.