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

[#] Songs About Jane (2002)

Quintessential 2000s on-again off-again love rock.

Reviewed May 2, 2025

A few years following the failure of Kara's Flowers, Maroon 5 sprung back to life to slightly delayed, zingy pop success. What was the secret sauce? Drama. Songs About Jane is bathed in the tales of love and woe that The Fourth World was pretty free of. It works! Maroon 5 get by by splitting the difference, enough bite in the spiky rhythms and guitars to play to a pop-friendly rock crowd, and enough prettiness in Adam Levine's croon and cruelty in his words to propel this thing to 5x platinum in the US alone. I like it a bunch, but a bit of overproduction here (the fake "live" "Not Coming Home", really?), a bit of repeating yourself there—it's not perfect. In truth, I do rather miss the boyish overspill of ideas these guys had as Kara.

As a rock listener, you'd imagine the grittier tracks would work best on me, and you'd be right. "This Love" slimes along with its dramatic pianos and icy guitar stabs, and opener "Harder to Breathe" matches Adam's wordy aggression with a huge, killer humbucker tone. A lot of the ballads aren't bad either—"She Will Be Loved" is a rainy scene in a romance film, and the edginess of "Secret"'s lyrics with the song's minor-key hesitancy and buildup suits it well. Jane's downfall is the occasional moments of, erm, familiarity in the back half; if we can dunk on Nickelback for writing the same song over and over, how about Maroon 5 doing it within a three-song space between "The Sun" and "Sunday Morning"? And anyone else hear the uncanny Jay Kay impersonation on "Sweetest Goodbye"?

Essential:	"Harder to Breathe", "This Love", "She Will Be Loved"
Quintessential:	"Must Get Out"
Non-Essential:	"Sunday Morning"
Rating:

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!)

Essential:	"Soap Disco", "Myself", "To Her, With Love"
Quintessential:	"Loving the Small Time"
Non-Essential:	"Pantry Queen"
Rating: