Maroon 5 Album Recommendations

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Maroon 5 (as Kara's Flowers)

[#] The Fourth World (1997)

Before they became animals-mals.

Reviewed August 5, 2024

Lookit those four fresh faces on the cover of The Fourth World. Sure, they've shacked up with Rob Cavallo of Green Day fame, but that just makes the guitars slam on a chest level. They aim for snot on occasion, but they can't even keep it up ("I can't find anything to be sad about!" it goes on one occasion). That's why you know them as Maroon 5 and not Kara's Flowers. That these teens would go on to be such a defining pop act is one of those classic music mythos that threatens to distract from how good the goods really are on The Fourth World. Even if it's not particularly original (and even in the realm of 60s-by-90s pop rock, I think Superdrag did it a little more interestingly), anyone who likes a good self-aware singalong will have no trouble embracing this.

From "go", Adam Levine's eternally bright deadpan darts like a blowgun out of the chugging guitars that build up earwormy opener "Soap Disco". He'll be what you notice most, of course, but what you'll notice next is how good his tunes are, even then. These guys gleefully cover musical ground they simply never revisit, whether it's the abrupt, dissonant "Myself", the sitar-backed bridge on the otherwise punky "Oliver", the adorable fingerpicked acoustic ballad "To Her, With Love", or the rockabilly breakdown that closes out "My Ocean Blue" (a song about Jane, funnily enough). You can imagine not every idea a couple of teenage guys come up with is particularly well thought out or memorable, but most of The Fourth World is, and that's damn impressive.

(Thank you Connor for the suggestion!)