Overexposed: Maroon 5’s Slick New Pop Album (Review)

The following is a review of Maroon 5's album Overexposed that I wrote for the online music service KKBox a year ago. Their head office is in Taiwan, but they recently set up a Singapore branch, which is why they needed articles in English, and this is the first one I did for them. As the version they used is only viewable by subscribers to their service in Singapore (so I can't even view it myself), I am republishing it here. I haven't changed it from the version I sent to them (though I don't know whether the editor I was working with did anything to it), but I've added some comments at the bottom to further clarify my opinion of the album as compared with the band's earlier work.

Overexposed: Maroon 5’s Slick New Pop Album

Maroon 5 first burst into the public consciousness with soulful funk rock like the group’s breakout hit, the Stevie Wonder-inspired “This Love”. Their debut album Songs About Jane was released in 2002, though it wasn’t until “This Love” was released as a single in 2004 that the group achieved international superstardom, solidified by further hits taken from Songs About Jane such as the popular ballad “She Will Be Loved”. The band’s next two albums, 2007’s It Won't Be Soon Before Long (which featured the group’s first US No. 1, “Makes Me Wonder”) and 2010’s Hands All Over, showed increasing pop sophistication and polish, while retaining much of the funky edge of their debut. Following slightly weaker sales for Hands All Over, Maroon 5 bounced back in 2011 with the huge international hit “Moves Like Jagger”, a single featuring Christina Aguilera that sold over 8 million copies worldwide, becoming one of the top songs of the year and Maroon 5’s best selling song by far.

With their fourth album, Overexposed, Maroon 5 is clearly aiming to capitalize on the massive success of “Moves Like Jagger” (the title of which refers to Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones) in the hope of matching the sales of Songs About Jane, which remains their best selling album. They have stated in interviews that they consciously made a pop record, shifting further away from indie rock and toward polished pop and dance-oriented music. “Jagger”, which was written mainly by producer/songwriters Benjamin Levin (co-writer of songs like Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” and Rhianna’s “Diamonds”) and Shellback (co-writer of P!nk’s “So What” and “Raise Your Glass”) with some additional writing by Maroon 5 lead singer Adam Levine, also inspired the group to make increased use of outside writers on Overexposed. On the band’s first two albums, all the songs were written by Levine with other members of the band (chiefly guitarist James Valentine and keyboardist Jesse Carmichael) or on his own. On Hands All Over, the group collaborated with outside writers on a few tracks, but wrote most of the album themselves. On Overexposed, however, while Levine co-wrote all of the songs, he only wrote four of them with other members of the band, writing all the rest, including the album’s singles, with Shellback, Benjamin Levin and other outside writers. The result is an album that emphasizes a radio-friendly, danceable sound over guitar rock.

Overexposed’s lead single, “Payphone”, is a catchy mid-tempo track about a broken romance featuring somewhat superfluous rapping by Wiz Khalifa. Propelled by its propulsive chorus, the song hit number 2 in the US and became their first UK chart topper. The album opener and second single, “One More Night” is a reggae-tinged pop song about a bad relationship with sexually irresistible lover that topped the US Billboard singles chart for nine straight weeks. The album’s third track and third single is “Daylight”, a soft rock ballad reminiscent of Coldplay. Of the four tracks written entirely by Maroon 5 themselves, the most notable are “Ladykiller”, a Michael Jackson-style number in which the singer’s girlfriend has left him for another woman, and the piano-based ballad “Sad”, which is a welcome change of pace from the dance beats that dominate elsewhere. Lyrically, the songs on Overexposed tread familiar ground for Maroon 5, being mostly about broken, dysfunctional, and sexually-charged relationships, but with the focus on the catchy pop hooks, the lyrics are relatively unimportant. While it marks a distinct departure from the sound heard on Songs About Jane, Overexposed should appeal to fans of danceable, soul-flavored pop, possibly winning Maroon 5 a new audience.

While of course I didn't write anything in this review that I didn't really think was true, I also didn't ever state outright what I really thought of Overexposed. However, most people no doubt can read between the lines and see that I strongly preferred their earlier albums, particularly their first. Overexposed is not terrible: it's got a few decent songs and overall it's more listenable than a lot of pop albums. But it's way too slick and overproduced, and it's obvious that the band was abandoning much of their original sound in a blatant effort to repeat the commercial success of "Moves Like Jagger" (which isn't that great either). While it's true, as I wrote, that this album will appeal to many pop fans (e.g., those who like shallow, disposable pop), I myself would much rather listen to the band's previous albums.