Maroon 5 - Jordi

Pitchfork 47

Read Dani Blum’s review of the album.

The Guardian 0

Adam Levine and co’s seventh album is business as usual, reliant on an army of songwriters and producers, plus guest artists to inject personality. Auto-Tuned Stevie Nicks, anyone?

It’s hard to think of another extant artist that’s been so big for so long while remaining as characterless as Maroon 5. Jordi is their seventh studio album: every one of its predecessors has sold a million copies in the US alone, at least. The anonymity of the members who aren’t frontman Adam Levine is a longstanding joke – you do rather imagine them arriving at rehearsals, staring at each other blankly and asking “sorry, can I help you?”

Furthermore, theirs is music that appears to be fuelled by nothing deeper than a desire to become – and stay – as commercially successful as possible. Most artists carry a hint of their listening habits in their sound, but Maroon 5 seem so beholden to current trends in mainstream pop that it’s genuinely hard to work out what their influences might be. The vague waft of Jamiroquai that haunted their early albums was jettisoned a decade ago, when a battalion of co-writers and producers arrived on the scene. Adam Levine occasionally sounds like Colin Hay, frontman of 80s Aussie hitmakers Men at Work, but that’s probably just a coincidence. Certainly, they never bother with the kind of lunges towards the left field that occasionally manifest themselves in the work of, say, Coldplay: Maroon 5’s fans can sleep easy, untroubled by the fear of chancing upon a production credit for Brian Eno or a horn arrangement by Femi Kuti.