Maroon 5 — Red Pill Blues ANALYSIS & REVIEW

Published 11/18/2017

I actually got the sense that they tried not to be awful, which made one of the worst albums I’ve heard in a long time even worse. The pathetic ugliness didn’t come from being erratic or missed opportunities; it came from complete absent-minded naivety and a total inability to see any sort of bigger picture with what they were doing. This band’s influences, if any, should really be ashamed of themselves. Whoever taught them that the music they created for this album is worth making should lose their job.

This album shows the band’s complete ineptitude to do one basic, necessary task for a musician: listen to themselves. These ungodly melodic repetitions are something to be played in torture chambers. These insanely tedious and bland harmonic progressions are textbook examples of how make someone with an active ear lose interest in your work in 10 seconds. The language itself, while utterly poor, wasn’t the entire problem; the main problem was the attempts at finding life in the harmonic layer, with the absolutely idiotic ornaments and basic 4/4 rhythms making me feel like I was slowly crawling through a desert and dying of thirst. It’s all tightly wrapped up and unable to breathe in a disgusting, systematized weak timbre that had no interesting features, no textural development and no likeable delivery of any musical idea.

There was hardly anything to even grasp onto and try to make sense of, as nothing warranted a place in my mind beyond a few seconds. They tried to mix it up a bit in the final song, which was their attempt at experimentation but came off as nothing but an insincere apology, with a 10-minute jam track featuring piano and saxophone. On the surface, this apology may seem easy to accept since it is indeed different and has a quality of smoothness that was nowhere else in the work. However, don’t be fooled; it’s actually just an unenthusiastic vamp with very little variation or legitimate musical thought, making it stoop to the same level as everything else after the first couple of minutes.

How they listened back to this monstrosity of lameness and decided to put their name on it is both baffling and frightening. It is complete run-down crap. As I said at the start, perhaps the worst part about it is that they did it with innocent smiles, just trying to brighten someone’s day. That pisses me off more than anything. They should quit making music, find jobs at candy shops or something, and leave our ears alone.