For a group that’s dominated the charts for ten years, Maroon 5 has always been confused about its identity. In 2002, the band released its debut, “Songs About Jane”, an earnest and accessible rock-and-R&B album which showcased Maroon 5’s high-caliber musicianship and knack for smart, catchy songwriting. The band followed up its debut with the release of “It Won’t be Soon Before Long” and “Hands All Over”. Both albums, while bolstered by party hits, were halfhearted as a whole and riddled with saccharine pop fodder (see “Never Gonna Leave This Bed”), making for a creative dark age in which Maroon 5 couldn’t quite unite its pop status and high-level musicianship into a cohesive and enjoyable whole. In 2012, everything changed with the release of Maroon 5’s fourth album, “Overexposed”. On it, the band teamed up with producer and pop-songwriting behemoth Max Martin, making a record that unashamedly pandered to the mainstream but was as banal as “Hands All Over” was inconsistent. Now, in 2014, Maroon 5 has dropped its fifth release, “V”. On paper, “V” might be Maroon 5’s best album yet, but in the end it’s severely lacking in personality.
Sure, “V” is cohesive. On it, the band embraces sleek, icy, electronic textures and applies them from track to track. This makes the album’s bangers and ballads – a dichotomy that Maroon 5 has tried to balance on previous albums with turbulent results – more unified. On slow-jammers like “Unkiss Me”, the use of the 808 bass drum and sawtooth bass synth stands the track up well within the context of the entire album, and makes it a lot slicker than the buzzkill-ballads from Maroon 5’s previous releases.
Also, “V” is smart. It boasts hydroponic hooks which give a whole new level of truth to the term “earworm”. The track “Animals”, with its minor seventh vocal interval and descending bassline, provides convincing proof that Adam Levine and Max Martin have successfully engineered the catchiest chorus of all time. If pop music is “processed”, Maroon 5’s “V” is genetically modified in a laboratory and shot full of anabolic steroids, as its choruses are such perfect specimens they border on mutant.
“V” has seemingly everything – except a soul. In addition to the album’s hyper-compressed vocal production which throws dynamics to the wind, frontman Adam Levine’s apathetic vocal delivery highlights the way his band tackles pop music on this record: as a job. Tracks like the Prince-inspired “Sugar” lose their potential magic when Levine manages to suck all the passion out of the sexy falsetto. “V” could have been great, had their been some conviction thrown into the mix. Instead, it manages to check off all the criteria of the perfect pop album but leaves listeners with an empty shell of a record.
Overall, Maroon 5’s formula on “V” is like the denominator of a fraction whose numerator is zero: while impressive, as long as there’s no overarching soul to the equation the band’s output will be worth nothing. Until Maroon 5 decides to approach pop like high art the way Lorde, La Roux, and even Lady GaGa do, they’ll continue to be the best worst band of all time.
Howard is a member of
the class of 2017.
