Maroon 5's Overexposed

Adam Levine of Maroon 5 said after their 2007 release It Won’t Be Soon Before Long that the band might make one more album before disbanding. Their subsequent release was the mediocre Hands All Over. I kind of had already expected them to be done when I was watching “The Voice” with my girlfriend and all of a sudden they were on stage premiering their new single, “Payphone,” off of their recently announced new album Overexposed. The song featured a verse by Wiz Khalifa... but I’ll get to that in my track-by-track review, which follows.

The album opens with the second single, “One More Night.” This song is stupid catchy. I hate it, but I find the “Yoouuuu-ooh-ooh-ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh...” part stuck in my head regularly after listening (or even thinking about) this album. The prechorus harmonies are awesome. This song, however, other than its inexplicable catchiness, is awful.

The second track is the lead single from the album, “Payphone.” I understand how this song got popular, but I can’t stand it.  The verse is great. Adam Levine’s vocals go so well with the drums it’s ridiculous. I’d be interested to hear this song slowed down with just a piano backing the vocals. Also, the lyrics are so dated it’s stupid. Kids today probably don’t even know what a payphone is. The rap verse with Wiz Khalifa is just a stupid gimmick to create crossover hit potential.

“Daylight,” the third track, is a beautiful song. The bridge is the best part. Unfortunately, Adam Levine has the kind of voice that seems not to be able to evoke emotion, so the performance doesn’t sound sincere at all. Usually, not evoking any emotion works to his advantage, but in a song like this, which requires a knockout, emotional performance, his method falls a little flat. I still love this song though.

For a guy they call the “One Take Wonder” in the recording studio, it’s an interesting choice to use auto-tune on Adam Levine in this song. “Lucky Strike” is the second track in a row with a great bridge, but unfortunately, in this case, the bridge doesn’t really fit with the rest of the song, and sounds like it should lead into a screaming guitar solo. I really don’t like the chorus of this song, as its focal point is a lyric-less melody of “Oh”s.

“The Man Who Never Lied” is a song that could easily have been improved by removing the disco beat from behind the vocals. The lyrics are stupid and the song is way too repetitive. I don’t like this song. I want to, but I don’t.

The next track, “Love Somebody,” can’t decide if it’s a dance club song or a slow dance. It’s very repetitive and uses synthesized sounds in an overbearing way. This song again fails in part because of Levine’s inability to sound sincere. This song would probably have worked as a power ballad, but the band tried way too hard to make it a slow jam instead.

“Ladykiller” is a fantastic song. This song accomplishes what Foster the People’s popular song “Pumped Up Kicks” fails to do. Levine bounces between full voice and falsetto with such effortless facility. Mickey Madden plays an awesome bass line that doesn’t change over the whole song, but it actually never gets boring. It doesn’t get boring because it meshes so well with everything the rest of the band is doing.

There’s not much to the following track, “Fortune Teller,” but it has a really cool sounding verse. The chorus falls flat though, thanks to its clichéd melody. The prechorus is a thing of beauty though, and I’d have been happier with this song if that were the chorus instead.

“Sad” is a nice break from the disco-pop feel of the rest of the album, as it features Adam Levine singing over an acoustic piano. However, like the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside,” he sings the same note too much of the song. That technique only works when the rest of the band is playing something extremely interesting (see the aforementioned Killers song, “A Crow Left of the Murder” by Incubus, and almost anything by the Strokes). The lyrics, “I’m so sad,” are performed beautifully.

The next song, “Tickets,” starts out promising, with guitar backing Levine’s vocals, but quickly turns to power-synth drops. The vocals are almost addicting for most of the song, and the chorus has an awesome seventies funk groove to it. I’m seriously tired of the “La”s and “Ooh”s by this point on the album though, and the “La”s featured in this song are definitely annoying. At 2:33 the song stops for no reason, very awkwardly. The lyrics are also very strange. I don’t know what to think of this song on a whole.

The eleventh track, “Doin’ Dirt,” starts out with a stupid “She-Wolf” howl from Levine, but quickly moves to a brilliantly fantastic verse. The song continues its success into the chorus, wonderfully executed by the whole band. This song is definitely a highlight on the album.

“Beautiful Goodbye,” the final track on the album, lives up to its self-proclaimed beauty. The song is carefully reminiscent of “Sunday Morning,” from their first album (albeit without the awesome breakdown). This song is a little too repetitive, but it sounds so nice that it gets a pass. It starts off with a weird second of drums that don’t need to be there, but otherwise, this song closes the album very well.

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Overall, Maroon 5’s fourth album, Overexposed, is a letdown. The album on a whole would be better suited as a remix album. If the band had performed more of the songs on real instruments without as many digital effects or pop synthesizers, this would be a much better album. Levine too often substitutes “La” and “Ooh” for actual lyrics, and it gets very tiresome throughout the course of this album. Jesse Carmichael, who was very involved in the writing process of Maroon 5’s previous three albums, is currently on hiatus from the band, and they sorely miss his presence. The band clearly fell too hard on the success of their 2011 hit single, “Moves Like Jagger,” thinking that they could too easily extrapolate its success into an album of the same type of song. While there are highlights on this album (notably “Daylight,” “Ladykiller,” and “Doin’ Dirt”), this is not an album I would buy. Maybe the songs are better when not heard all in a row, but for now, that’s my stance on it. Please let me know how you feel in the comments below!

Overexposed is available in four formats.

Standard Edition: the 12 track album as a compact disc.

Digital Edition: the 12 track album as high-quality mp3 downloads on its street date.

Deluxe Edition: the 12 track album as either a compact disc or high quality mp3 downloads with the bonus tracks “Wipe Your Eyes,” “Wasted Years,” and “Kiss” (originally performed by Prince).

Deluxe Package: the 12 track album as a compact disc AND as high quality mp3 downloads with the bonus tracks “Wipe Your Eyes,” “Wasted Years,” and “Kiss” (originally performed by Prince), limited edition album-themed t-shirt, and twelve postcards featuring art for each song.

To buy Overexposed, visit http://maroon5.com/thelocker/

Linkin Park's Living Things

At this point, Linkin Park has become almost legendary to certain people, namely people who loved their first two albums. Their third album, while still distinctly Linkin Park, was a departure from their traditional sound. Their fourth album, A Thousand Suns, released in 2010, was a drastic departure from the sound on any of their first three albums. Labeled a “concept album,” A Thousand Suns actually alienated a lot of those fans who had created legends of Linkin Park and their original sound in the early 2000s. Their fifth album, set to drop on Tuesday, has been labeled by some as the band’s “return to its roots” (iTunes Notes, 2012). I disagree. What follows is my track-by-track review of Linkin Park’s fifth album, Living Things.

The album starts with a song called “Lost in the Echo,” which itself starts with a very electronic sound that I would call a mix of modern disco (think: Lady Gaga) and dubstep. The verse has no guitar in it; instead, Mike Shinoda’s rapping is backed by two keyboard parts and sometimes an overdriven bass. Chester Bennington sings on the chorus, which is kind of catchy, and has some guitar, but it’s very mechanized in sound, as if the guitar itself was put through a synthesizer. The scream into the bridge doesn’t work with this sound. This song floats between okay and good.

I have a question for Linkin Park. Did you guys really think that no one would notice that “In My Remains” and “Burn It Down” are instrumentally the same exact song!? Okay, sorry, they’re about as different instrumentally as “Under Pressure” and “Ice, Ice Baby”... The vocals are very different in the two songs, and I actually really like “In My Remains.” Bennington’s vocals, besides sounding fantastic, actually fit well with this instrumentation. “Burn It Down” is a different story. As much as I love basketball, TNT cannot convince me to like this song. The verse is performed well by Bennington, but the rest of the song is so generic that I can’t help but feel nothing while listening to it. I absolutely cannot understand the decision to put these two songs back to back, as they sound way too similar for that to be okay.

I can’t help but think of Avril Lavigne when “Lies Greed Misery” starts, because the beginning of this song sounds way too much like “What the Hell.” That riff continues during the chorus, which is just Bennington rapping in a sort of scream. This song is fairly worthless, with the exception of the badass bridge, where guitarist Brad Delson lets loose for twenty four seconds under Bennington’s screamed vocals (actually a highlight on the album).

With “I’ll Be Gone,” I finally get comfortable with this album. This is a fantastic song. It’s fairly simple in its structure and chord progression, but it benefits from a strong, genuine performance from Bennington.

I love “Castle of Glass.” The structure is very predictable, but at this point, that’s probably a good thing for Linkin Park. Shinoda’s singing is haunting to start the song, and then Bennington joins him in unison for a little bit before starting to sing harmony against him. This is a great driving song.

“Victimized,” the seventh track here, is the heaviest song Linkin Park has ever written. This is another strange choice in sequencing, because “Castle of Glass” and “Roads Untraveled” are relatively mellow (especially “Roads Untraveled”). The verse is pretty cool, with Shinoda singing, but that’s the end of that. The chorus and what happens after is just crap. The backing instrumentation to Shinoda’s rap section is literally just noise. This song may grow on me like Avenged Sevenfold’s “God Hates Us,” but I doubt it, as that song has guitar parts that are actually worth something.

The next track, “Roads Untraveled,” has this weird chime type instrument playing throughout the song. And it’s terrible. The song would be infinitely better without the chime going for nearly four minutes. Shinoda and Bennington harmonize very well in the chorus of this song and the “whoa”s that come after (though I’m pretty sure that’s just Bennington layered over himself). The chimes take a short break for a stripped down chorus near the end of the song, but they’re right back at it for the ending. I would love this song if not for the chimes.

“Skin to Bone” is a very interesting song. The melody kind of reminds me of a nursery rhyme, but it’s performed well enough that I forget it against the almost-dubstep instrumentation. I would prefer the super repetitive quasi-dubstep sound to be gone from this song, but it doesn’t kill me.

The next song, “Until It Breaks,” is the “Nobody’s Listening” of this album. It just sounds weird. Shinoda seems to think that he’s Jamaican on this song, and the backing instrumentation can barely be called that until Bennington’s vocals come in over the piano. The strings in the chorus are a nice touch, but the chorus and verse don’t mesh very well with each other. The highlight of this song is easily at about 2:15 when guitarist Brad Delson sings for the first time on a Linkin Park album. This part of the song was something that he wrote at home and brought to the band four months before they wrote “Until It Breaks,” and during the recording process of the song, they realized that that fit best as the ending to that song. In my opinion, it pretty much saves the song.

Like their first two albums, the second to last song here, “Tinfoil,” is an instrumental song. Unlike their first two albums, this song is basically an elongated intro to the final track, “Powerless.” “Powerless” is a song that is exactly opposite of that which its name would suggest, thanks to another strong, genuine performance by Bennington. The mechanized instrumentation can get tiresome at times over the course of the song (particularly the percussive elements of it), but overall, “Powerless” is a beautiful song that was a good choice as the album closer.

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I listened to this album something like ten times so that I would know exactly what to say, and after having done that, my biggest problem with it is that I had to listen to it something like ten times so that I would know exactly what to say. This album, while certainly better than A Thousand Suns, and though it has its standout tracks, does not stand out in Linkin Park’s catalog.

It’s hard to like this album because Chester Bennington really doesn’t have the kind of voice that goes well with the more electronic orchestration of their music. He has a very distinctly rock style of singing when he gets to his higher register, and he either is unable to or chooses not to use a smoother tone that would fit better with the instrumentation on this album. In contrast, I love the parts on this album when Mike Shinoda sings. His voice fits in very well with the different arrangements. However, if you replace all the singing on this album with the same melody and lyrics, performed by John Legend or Usher, this could very easily be a hip hop album.

Linkin Park’s first two albums were full of songs backed by very inventive and creative, metal-influenced guitar riffs that have been mostly absent on the three albums since then. This album has so little guitar on it that Brad Delson had to ask to sing on one of the tracks so that he could still feel like he was important to the band¹. Songs like “Papercut,” “One Step Closer,” “Hit the Floor,” and “Figure.09” are great examples of this inventiveness that basically made a generation of rock-listeners fall in love with this band. While it’s great for them that they’re experimenting and having fun with it, at this point, I feel like fans are losing faith in the idea that Linkin Park can create an album that they can enjoy from start to finish.

Please leave your thoughts in the comments section below!

¹That’s not actually why he sings, I’m making a point.

Living Things is available in two formats.

Standard Edition: the 12 track album as a compact disc, an instant mp3 download of "Burn It Down," a high quality digital download of the full album on its street date, early access to tickets for the Honda Civic Tour in North America, and a subscription to Living Things Remixed (you will receive one new remix per month for the next 8 months).

Digital Edition: the 12 track album as high-quality mp3 downloads on its street date, an instant mp3 download of "Burn It Down," early access to tickets for the Honda Civic Tour in North America, and a subscription to Living Things Remixed (you will receive one new remix per month for the next 8 months).

To buy Living Things, visit http://livingthings.linkinpark.com/

Metric's Synthetica

While most American audiences may know Metric as the band from the 2010 film Scott Pilgrim Versus the World¹, they’ve actually been releasing music steadily since 2003. Emily Haines of Metric has said that Synthetica “is about forcing yourself to confront what you see in the mirror when you finally stand still long enough to catch a reflection. Synthetica is about being able to identify the original in a long line of reproductions. It's about what is real vs. what is artificial." In the follow-up to 2009’s Fantasies, Haines and co. look deep within themselves while still expanding on the sound that made Fantasies a success. Read on for my track-by-track analysis of their new album, Synthetica, coming out Tuesday.

The album starts with a synthesizer behind Emily Haines’ haunting vocals, singing about how she’s “just as f---ed up as they say.” About two minutes in, the rest of the band starts playing. They managed to keep the song just haunting enough, while also making it kind of catchy. Overall, this song is the perfect choice to open the album, as it has the energy it needs to catch the attention of the listener, and it just plain sounds like the start of something big.

The next track is the first single from the album, “Youth Without Youth.” To be honest, when I first heard this song, I didn’t think it was anything special. To be fair, the first time I heard it, I was in a foul mood and I was listening on sub-par speakers. I really love this song. It has a dance-groove feel to the instrumentation, and Haines snarls the verse in such a way that you can’t help but bounce your head along with this song that, if it had to be described in one word, would be described as “cool.”

“Speed the Collapse” comes next. This song was the second song available to listen from the album. I can see this song used as the background of a chase scene on horses in like a modern western. I don’t know why, that’s just how it feels to me. It’s like Muse meets Paramore meets Metric's last album Fantasies.

“Breathing Underwater” is easily my favorite on the album. It starts off beautifully, as the bass and guitar mesh over a drum beat very cleverly constructed by Joules Scott-Key not to overpower the delicate sound. Every time Emily Haines sings, “Is this my life?” to start the chorus, I have to start bobbing my head, at least. James Shaw’s guitar riff to exit the chorus is, while repetitive, a perfect fit for the song—especially how it sounds over the crazy keyboard part that is difficult to hear without headphones. The song also builds really well, as some instrumental part gets added or expanded upon with each pass. I also love the imagery presented in the chorus: “Is this my life? Am I breathing underwater?”

The fifth track, “Dreams So Real,” is only two and a half minutes long, and the most of that is just a synth sawing single notes with Haines singing over it. It works, mainly because Metric has, as a band, worked on perfecting that style, but the song is not one of my favorites on the album.

The song that follows, however, I find very intriguing. The verse is so weird that I’ve heard the song like at least twenty times and I can’t decide whether or not I like it. But the chorus is so awesome. Emily’s falsetto is at its best in the chorus as she sings about how she’ll cover up all the things the subject seems to want to keep secret. It’s a fairly simple song that works mainly because none of them try to overdo it and turn it into something it’s not. I love at the end when they layer the bridge vocals with the chorus vocals.

“The Void” starts out with noises that make you think the song is going to be some sort of trance music. The noises are never heard again, which I think is weird, but it works for the beginning. The chorus vocals are done in a call and response style, and it’s great, mainly because it’s done over very strong instrumentation, including a straight up superb bass line by Joshua Winstead. I love the line in the chorus “All night, sing along with the band and you’re losing your voice”

The title track comes next, and it’s just an awesome alternative rock song. Haines snarls the verse here again over driving instrumentation. The transitions from verse to chorus and back are so simple, and so effective. This is a great song, and the album deserves to be named after it.

“Clone” sounds to me like a song No Doubt would have released that nobody ever heard on the radio. The lyrics sound like a memory of a theme park, perhaps something one of her parents told her once. It’s a slower song, and a strange choice to follow “Synthetica.” It’s an okay track that I might have left for a B-side.

The next track, “The Wanderlust,” features vocals from Lou Reed on the chorus. I was surprised when I heard it at first, as Metric is not known to have vocalists other than Emily Haines performing any lead vocals on their tracks. It almost sounds like a song by the band that did “Barbie Girl” (Aqua) or the band that did “Love Shack” (the B-52s), although with more talent.

“Nothing But Time” makes sure the album closes just as hauntingly as it starts. With a repetitive base synth part that is built upon as the song goes on, the song gets deeper into its trance. For such a simple song, it’s way too addictive to be written off with other songs of equal simplicity. This song closes the album right.

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To wrap it up, I love this album. Metric’s Synthetica is a work of art. It’s fantastic from start to finish. The “dull” moments can only be called dull in comparison to the standouts on the album. I was worried I wouldn’t like this album. I wasn’t crazy about anything of Metric’s before their breakout Fantasies, and I was worried they’d revert. But they just grew. This album is big for them. I can see Metric breaking out in a big way in the future. I’m seriously looking forward to their next album. Let me know what YOU think! Comment below.

¹ They did not perform the song in the movie, but they wrote it and it was re-recorded with the actress Brie Larson singing for the scene in the film.

Synthetica is available in three formats.

Standard Edition: the 11 track album as a compact disc + high quality digital download on release date, single “Youth Without Youth” immediately, and 5 bonus Reflections tracks.
[Note: this version has all of the booklet text printed backwards and includes a small mirror for reading it]

Digital Edition: the 11 track album as high quality mp3 files.

Vinyl Edition: the 11 track album on white vinyl discs + high quality digital download on release date, single “Youth Without Youth” immediately, and 5 bonus Reflections tracks.

To buy Synthetica, visit http://ilovemetric.com/store/