Sit down and make yourselves comfortable. This is one of those hard-work-pays-off-then-doesn't sort of sagas.
No sooner had LA-based quintet Maroon 5 resigned themselves to slogging across America's bar-rooms hawking their road-hewn brand of '70s-influenced riff-o-la to ever diminishing returns, suddenly they had to get used to people taking notice. After two years, they conquered the US airplay charts, had their album picked up by Clive "Whitney Houston calls me 'Sir'" Davis and his J label, and became the nation's longest-serving "overnight" stars.
So they come to Britain and what happens? Their first single flies straight in to the upper reaches of the chart and splashes itself all over commercial radio stations, yet Adam Levine and his band find themselves pilloried in the press for, frankly, not a very great deal. One music monthly has compared this record to Toploader which is taking things a little too far, which is taking things a bit too far, while one of my esteemed peers at this very online organ even felt it necessary to mention the words "Spin" and "Doctors". Oh dear.
The reality, we can assure you dear reader, is a great deal less worrisome than that. Maroon 5, on this evidence, are a band in tune with, if perhaps sometimes in thrall to, classic rock's past. That ace first single, "Harder To Breathe", is a pugnacious rifferama with the same sort of instinctive head-nod factor that, at base level, explains why metal and rap get along so well musically. Those of us with long memories and/or overly stuffed record collections might also choose to invoke the ghosts of Rare Earth, Power Of Zeus, Grand Funk Railroad and Flaming Ember.
'This Love' goes all Billy Joel, but in the way that Kool G Rap & DJ Polo did on "Road To The Riches". "Tangled" is Stevie Wonder's keyboards re-thought for electric guitar, while "The Sun" is a close relative of "Superstition". At their most emphatic, Maroon 5 have it in them to be U2-sized huge. There are stadium-ready anthems here, atmospherics bubbling through the "Joshua Tree"-ish "Must Get Out", "Sunday Morning" pitching itself halfway between the Commodores' and the Chili Peppers' readings of "Easy" without actually being the same song.
And this is two years old. Admittedly, they could have regressed, could have allowed the dislocation and insularity of all that road time blind them to their own strengths, and cocked it all up by now. But this record suggests they're a band who already had a sneaking suspicion they might be pretty good, and were on a mission to prove that to the rest of us. Now they've done so, there'll be no stopping 'em. Anyone who doesn't like it will just have to lump it.
