Hands All Over The Place 3 Out Of 5 Stars
Maroon Five make that perfect, glossy pop that sticks in your ear like a tootsie roll. They also have two main aces in that they are great pop writers and Adam Levine has a terrific voice for this kind of playfulness. For their third album, they go for the big bam boom of producer Robert Mutt Lange, who made the likes of Def Leppard and Foreigner shoot out of radios like sucker-tipped darts from plastic toy guns.
They definitely succeed in making a gloriously catchy pop album. "Hands All Over" sounds so pristine that you could eat the cotton candy right off the disc. Levine and company now show that they can clone any style, be it the Bee Gees pop of "Get Back In My Life," the Foreigner-lite of the title track and the Shania Twain for the boys of "Out Of Goodbyes" (featuring Lady Antebellum). There's also a bit more guitar in the mix, which adds some heft to some otherwise lightweight songs ("Never Gonna Leave This Bed" for example).
What is missing is any sense of continuity, which the other two Maroon 5 albums had. There's plenty to like about "Hands All Over," but I get the feeling Lange squeezed any personality out of the songs in his usual relentless push for perfection. The album sounds great. Song for song, it also works. I just wish it sounded more like a band than an art project.
No comments:
Post a Comment