Maroon 5
Travis Schneider*No space is safe from the heaviness of our times — even, it appears, a Maroon 5 record. The tone of Adam Levine and company’s seventh LP is downright elegiac. “Toast to the ones that we lost on the way,” Levine offers on “Memories,” a sweet, somber, genuinely felt ballad, with a melody borrowed from Pachelbel’s Canon. Jordi is named after and dedicated to Jordan Feldstein, the band’s manager and a friend of Adam’s since childhood, who passed away in 2017, just as the band was releasing its last album, Red Pill Blues.
Earlier on the LP, we get the single, “Nobody’s Love,” an elegantly plaintive tune that Levine has said he hopes will “give everyone a moment of peace and reflection” after recent traumas like Covid-19 and the murder of George Floyd. Lyrically, the song is almost content-free, just another smooth ditty about moving past heartache, but there’s a certain realist honesty in that, too: Sugary escape has always been what Maroon 5 have done, and, coming from these guys, it’s certainly a better response than forced corporate-branding #BLM signifying. Even the remix of “Memories” with YG and the late Nipsey Hussle, the duo who made “FDT,” doesn’t try to politicize its sentiment of personal loss. Lane, consider yourself stayed in.
That low-key tone impacts the rest of the record, from “Lost,” a spare, open-hearted ode to finding love in a lonely world, to airy, heart-horny jams “Lovesick” and “Echo.” Much of the album’s energy comes from its impressive slate of guest artists. Megan Thee Stallion swings by to pick up a check and lend a dash of queenly excellence to the standout “Beautiful Mistake”; Zimbabwean-born rapper Bantu helps kick up the stakes over a buoyant groove and arid guitar swipes on “One Light”; and H.E.R. delivers arresting vocals on “Convince Me Otherwise,” a moody Eighties synth-soul escapade that ends up being the album’s peak moment. But there are wasted opportunities too. Stevie Nicks seems to have been in the room for “Remedy,” a well-turned moment of SoCal Seventies soft-rock genuflection, but she’s rendered as not much more than an anonymous backup presence, and the ghost of Juice WRLD wanly floats through the draggy “Can’t Leave You Alone.”
In the end, what the album could use is a few more drink-clinking splashes of summertime fun, but despite the usual army of A-list writers and producers, there isn’t really anything here to rival the sticky, inescapable punch of “Sugar” or “Moves Like Jagger.” A little more escape might’ve been welcome. But whether it’s trying to be light, serious, or somewhere in the middle, Jordi can only get it done in half-measures.
ALBUM REVIEWS
It seems weird that Måneskin frontman Damiano David’s debut solo album would land on Eurovision weekend, given that the past Italian victors have done so well to escape and thrive outside of the shadow of the cheese-romp song contest. Since their victory in 2021, the band have won love from the likes of Iggy Pop and Tom Morello and arenas full of fans that have probably never heard the words “douze points!”
Proving himself all over again, here stands David free from any of the rock’n’roll tropes that found him fame – and nearly ruined him. “In the last few years, we worked a lot and I was starting to lose the focus… I was basically making myself unhappy, and I was doing pretty good at it,” he told NME about the journey of “cutting out all the excess” that led to this solo venture.
The same rehab for excess can be said for the music too. Sure, ‘Funny Little Fears’ is huge in scale and melodrama (what else did you expect?), but it’s still a record free of distractions and laser-focused on straight-up pop bangers.
Opener ‘Voices’ meets the pomp with the personal as he tries to outrun his demons on a real stadium-rattler akin to that ‘Beggin’ cover he did so well, while ‘Next Summer’ has enough echoes of ABBA to make it a heartache epic. From the Lennon-y piano of ‘Sick Of Myself’ to the shameless summer indie-pop of ‘Tango’ to the star-reaching orchestral grace of ‘Mars’ and the Killers-y Americana road anthem of ‘The First Time’, it’s a collection that’s confident in squaring up to fears and all quite tastefully measured.
That includes some guest turns with Suki Waterhouse lending silky vocals to the “lighters up” earworm ‘The Bruise’ and viral sensation D4vd jumps on the sweet old-school waltz of ‘Tangerine’. Subtlety is the order of the day on the elegiac electro lullaby closer ‘Solitude (No One Understands Me)’ as David poetically cuts to the existential core of the record: “I’ve got a funny fear of flying, it’s not the height or the chance of maybe dying / It’s finding out the Earth was flat and finding out everybody here was lying.”
For his soul-baring, personal flair and finding his own musical accent away from the juggernaut that made him, you’d be forgiven for comparing this to a Harry Styles move. Despite bassist Victoria De Angelis enjoying a sideline as a techno artist, David and the band maintain that former NME cover stars Måneskin are currently “in training to get back different, better and harder”. We might miss a little bit of glam-rock insanity here, but ‘Funny Little Fears’ is a classy pop statement from an artist just comfortable in their own skin. As David offers on ‘Solitude’: “No one understands me, but I do”.
