Caroline Sullivan 

Maroon 5: Overexposed – review

Maroon 5's precision-tooled new album doesn't contain anything wildly exciting, writes Caroline Sullivan
  
  


The title of Maroon 5's fourth album is a straightforward declaration: owing to 8m sales of the 2011 single Moves Like Jagger, plus leader Adam Levine's stint as a judge on the US edition of The Voice, the public have seen rather a lot of this band lately. But this album could change that, because nothing here is in Jagger's insanely catchy league. That's not for want of trying – where previously Maroon 5 mainly wrote their own songs, here they've tried to reproduce the Jagger effect by collaborating with Britney Spears songwriter Max Martin, among other expensive hitmakers, but the songs they came up with are not especially memorable. The hooklines and characteristic high-shine production are there, but don't quite replicate Jagger's blue-sky charm – quite the opposite in the case of Payphone, which bolts together hip-hop, a superfluous Wiz Khalifa rap and some embarrassing effing and blinding from Levine. Try instead the pumped-up electropop track Doin' Dirt and One More Night's white-dude reggae.

 

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