Album Details

• Artist: Maroon 5
• Album: Overexposed
• Label: A&M Octone
• Year of Release: 2012
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: carlita on 2012-07-02

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Maroon 5, the pop rock band that made being a sensitive badass cool (le sigh) in 2002 with their hot debut, Songs About Jane dropped their fourth album last week called Overexposed. Inserting the obvious joke, very self-aware of themselves and the occasional glitzy ridiculous lifestyle Hollywood provides, they get right to the point with the title for this album, not pulling any punches, acknowledging their lead singer Adam Levine's reality TV fame and the success using that built-in audience to produce a hit, "Moves Like Jagger". Along with unabashedly going after the mainstream pop audience, the band continues in the disco ball/ dance (what a surprise) pop direction set by that aforementioned hit with this new record.  

Switching things up by bringing in new producers, Max Martin, Benny Blanco and Ryan Tedder who we all know have impressive and dazzling pop résumés, getting into the artists' psyche, translating this ability into the listener wanting to party all night or grab a Kleenex but does this experiment work here? Not really.  As a successful pop band, the genre may force you to sell out for units or risk not getting the sales to maintain artistic integrity.  Unfortunately it doesn't go both ways and this struggle is visible on lyrical yawners like "Payphone" (does the average teen know what a payphone is?) with Wiz Khalifa, "Daylight" and pretty much the first half of the album.

However, there are traces of Songs About Jane (which I still rock by the way) greatness on "Sad", which will make girls swoon and "wipe their eyes", "Tickets", and "Wasted Years".  When I got to the last track of the deluxe album, a cover of Prince's "Kiss", I was possibly ready to roll my eyes but was pleasantly surprised by the brave, blues/rockabilly version which ended the album on a strong note and served as a "beautiful goodbye".  Disappointingly though for longtime M5 fans, they may discover that those types of "lucky strikes" are few and far between.

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