This week’s featured album recommendation for Records Ranked comes from Om Makwana, known on Spotify as ‘ommak.’ I can personally vouch for Om as a true connoisseur of the musical arts, so when it came to finding a new album to review, who else would I turn to other than my friend down the hall?

His recommendation was Maroon 5’s Overexposed, the band’s fourth studio album released twelve years ago now! Upon first listen to this album, I came across three or four epiphanies of recognition, causing me to exclaim, “This is where that song is from!” More specifically, these are the singles that had been released before the album including “Payphone”, “One More Night”, and “Daylight”. These songs brought back memories of childhood and car radio, more familiar with the melody and tune than the actual lyrics, but nostalgic nonetheless. 

Overexposed marked a significant change in Maroon 5’s trajectory. Though they were relatively well known, it was “Moves Like Jagger” from their previous album Hands All Over that catapulted them into the limelight of the early 2010s. To avoid being a one-hit-wonder, they responded to their legions of new followers with a new, much more exploratory album. Early Maroon 5 could have been labeled as pop-rock, the electric guitar shining in many songs. With the success of this one song though, they started to shift their artistry to align more with the tastes of the public. Though the instrumentation still has stayed the same, its role has been greatly reduced, relying more on the vocalizations that frontman Adam Levine is now famed for. From this album forward, they truly only embody pop.

This action, while has brought the band more mainstream attention, has also isolated many of their original followers and there many who label the album “basic.” 

My analysis is in the middle of the two extremes. I think while Overexposed has four or five great songs, everything else is just…forgettable. I do not think there is enough variety that can allow the listener to differentiate some songs based on not only the story they tell but also of how they sound. 

We can see this is not only my opinion but also seems to be a trend throughout all listeners. Looking at the number of plays the tracks get on Spotify, we see that the popular catchy ones, the ones we all remember from our childhood, are loved and played again and again. “One More Night” — 800 million streams. “Payphone” — 1.6 billion. We see a sharp decrease in certain songs, dropping to the tens of millions of streams, quite literally magnitudes of ten far from the hits. Nearly every Maroon 5 song is about some mysterious girl, either one that the singer gives his heart to or the one that breaks it. This can get boring. And I understand that 90% of pop songs are essentially some variation of this common motif. And it’s not supposed to be a concept album like King Kendrick’s good kid, m.A.A.d city that tells a story so it’s unfair to judge them based on these standards. But what albums are supposed to do is take the listener on a journey, expose them to variation, either lyrically or musically. 

For these reasons, on my scale of 7 albums, I will place Overexposed 6th. Om, you missed on this one.