“You’re perfect on the outside, but nothing at the core.” That is Adam Levine summing up Maroon 5’s newest album Overexposed. Not content with their pop-sounding previous album, Hands All Over, the group takes a headfirst dive into the world of dance-electro-pop, delivering an entirely new kind of sound, though not exactly new for the rest of us.
Overexposed fully exposes the band’s pop music repertoire. It features the group’s grooviest and most upbeat tracklist, ranging from the reggae-infused One More Night, the ever-popular Payphone, to the club-sounding, hip-swaying tracks Lucky Strike, Lady Killer, and Doin’ Dirt, to name a few. Standouts from the list are the ballads, Sad and Beautiful Goodbye, which are reminiscent of the band’s earlier tracks.
Once the 12-track party ends, however, it is easy to come to the awful realization that Overexposed is the work of a band, but hardly sounding like it was made by one. It is painful to think that Overexposed is degrading the Grammy-award winning band to a one-man Adam Levine show. Gone are the catchy, instantly recognizable guitar riffs, for the bulk of the album is dominated by electronic dance elements. The album is a big 90-degree turn to a direction treaded by numerous artists all over, though the band’s effort is amiable.
One does not need musical proficiency to know that Overexposed is mainstream pop and an incredibly catchy earworm album, but it is nothing memorable or spectacular. The dilemma of art over charts seems to have hit the band hard.
In these days of pop music that rise to memetic levels of popularity as fast as they fade to obscurity, popular culture-resilient sounds are the ones that win, which is something Overexposed does not have.
One reply on “Rant and Rave: ‘Overexposed’”
I can only sigh… it’s almost as if they really DO want to be overexposed.