Maroon 5 - Red Pill Blues

Maroon 5
Red Pill Blues
2017
Spotify

So if you are a Maroon 5 fan this is not going to be the review for you. I have hated the band for years and seen as time after time they lift other lesser known acts' music and get away with it. It's fucking maddening that a band like this just gets away with it because of how big they are, but that's beside the point of the album. Red Pill Blues sees Maroon 5 going through yet another reinvention this time as an electropop outfit a la Hall & Oats or a shitty Chromeo. The first song "Best 4 U" sounds like a watered down track off of the Weeknd's Starboy but without the sense of experimentation and "What Lovers Do" is a straight rip off of Nekid's "Sexual". With this in mind it's hard to ever buy in to what Maroon 5 are doing because it feels calculated and malicious. Who cares who wrote the song first as long as Maroon 5 and Adam Levine's fucking falsetto can bring it to the masses at large? Well I for one care. That's the thing with Maroon 5 is sometimes they trick you with catchy hooks and slick production. "Wait" for example has all the potential in the world and this slick electropop sound actually suits them. They make such catchy music that it just drills down into your brain whether you like it or not. I love a great pop song, but these feel so surface level and thin that you always end up waking from the pop trance they are trying to put you in. "Lips on You" is the over the top sexually charged track that Maroon 5 have always included on their albums to varying degrees of success, and here it's little more than a bore.

It's funny, when electropop is done well it can really soar but when it feels like just an invocation of an era it never works. "Help Me Out" is a pretty slick minimal song the Levine absolutely ruins for featured singer Julia Michaels and I guess A$AP Rocky is on "Whiskey" but his performance sounds literally phoned in. The inclusion of rappers at all feels so calculated, especially the very fashionable Rocky. Has A$AP Rocky done a good feature in two years or is it his Jeans and footwear collection that keep him in the zeitgeist? Maroon 5 is all about doing what is happening right now, collect the cash and move on which is why you really don't hear any of their old stuff on heavy rotation. The last track "Closure" is inexplicably 11 and a half minutes long most of which is jam band none sense. I'm sure much to my shagrin this album will reach number one, have tons of hits and make Maroon 5 millions of dollars but people have to know what fucking trash this is. Don't settle for Maroon 5, dig a little deeper and find the people really making the music, not lifting it. Maroon 5 sucks.

1.0 out of 10