Fountains Of Wayne, Astoria, London

"You know you should hate me," sing Fountains of Wayne in tonight's opening track, "I've Got a Flair". For anyone with only a passing knowledge of the New Jersey power-pop quartet, the reason for such negative impulses might boil down to one song: "Stacy's Mom", their surprise 2003 hit about a teenager with the hots for his girlfriend's foxy mother. For fans, its success was a cheeky underdog's victory; for non-Wayne-ophiles, it made the band pop pariahs overnight.

Actually, "Stacy's" is hardly representative of Wayne's world. Far from packing such sauce-pop, their most recent albums, 2003's Welcome Interstate Managers and this year's Traffic and Weather, pivot on story-songs about thirtysomething "little folk", combining the perennial yearnings of classic pop with tales of temping, traffic jams, office crushes and other such daily travails.

The guitarist Jody Porter affects a few rock-star gestures, but the demeanour of Chris Collingwood (vocals/guitar) and Adam Schlesinger (bass) is non-starry. Indeed, Schlesinger introduces songs as if he's apologising for the noise his children are making.

The payoff is in the lived-in details. Workaday life and its emotional undercurrents are rarely so well treated by pop. "Hey Julie", the temps' anthem, with its lyrics about a "desk full of papers that mean nothing at all" and a "mean little" boss "with a clip-on tie and a rub-on tan", gets a loving reception.

So, Fountains of Wayne are the Springsteens of the commuter classes, transforming the lives of everyday people into intimate but all-embracing pop.