Maroon 5

Pop rock band from Los Angeles named Maroon 5 has released their sixth studio album on November 3rd, 2017. Red Pill Blues is the name of their new album which consists of fifteen songs and one remix featuring Cardi B in their greatest song from this album Girls Like You. So, the album name sounds really interesting! It refers to a popular cultural meme, a metaphor which represents the choice between a red pill and a blue pill. Red pill represents 'a life of harsh knowledge, desperate freedom, and the brutal truths of reality' and blue pill represents 'a life of luxurious security, tranquil happiness, and the blissful ignorance of the harsh realities of life, basking in an (essentially dishonest) illusion.' When you mix terms of the red pill and blue pill you get Red Pill Blues. There's a story that they got the idea for the name of the album from a movie called "The Matrix" filmed in 1999. Maroon 5 is a band of originally four members and now they have seven members: lead vocalist Adam Levine, keyboardist and rhythm guitarist Jesse Carmichael, bassist Mickey Madden, lead guitarist James Valentine, drummer Matt Flynn, keyboardist PJ Morton, and multi-instrumentalist Sam Farrar.

Maroon 5 is a music rock pop band that began in the early 2000’s. The group began making waves almost as soon as the group was created. This move was headed by their single “harder to breathe”. The group has kept growing stronger, although one or two persons have been replaced, the group has stayed strong producing beautiful music for all the world to enjoy. Friday the 13th is a recording of a live performance by the group (live album). Very little is known about what inspired the name of the album, some might be of the opinion that it is related to the day the album was recorded, which was on the 13th day of May, 2005. Or probably, it is something deeper, maybe something more personal. The album name was not referenced in the lyrics of the song so as to give us a little clue about the motive behind the name. Anyone that is willing to solve this puzzle will have to go to the artistes themselves. The album consists of a total of fourteen songs. The pop album is characterized by deeply insightful lyrics, classic beats and excellent vocals by Adam Levine, Jesse Carmicheal and Ryan Dusick. The songs are awesome but they do not really stick to the minds of listeners, the lyrics are extremely catchy but they just seem to have over stayed their welcome in the minds of men. The songs that really thrilled me from the album are "Through With You", "Wasted Years" and "She Will Be Loved". Contrary to the whole rock pop album, the songs are actually calm and soothing to the nerves.

The world consists of approximately seven billion people, each of them with different views and taste when it comes to music. That is probably why what may be considered as a hit by one group might be regarded as noise by others. Maroon 5 is a rock band that emerged in the early 2000’s. Their first hit album Songs About Jane was a major hit. Consequently, quite a number of live albums consisting different songs from the album were released in the years that followed. One of such albums is 1.22.03. 1.22.03 is an acoustic version of a few of the hit singles from the above mentioned album. The live album also includes two cover tracks by the band.

Sometimes my favorite band releases an album where I ambivalent towards the singles they and their record company decide to release. It happens from time to time and it certainly happened when Maroon 5 released the follow-up to their excellent debut album, Songs About Jane. I admit I was a bit crestfallen, because although the band broke new ground in their sophomore effort by finally scoring a #1 hit in the US charts with “Make Me Wonder”, none of the songs the band released as singles appealed to me at the same level that “Harder to Breathe” or “This Love” did. All their four releases (“Make Me Wonder”, “If I Never See Your Face Again”, “Wake Up Call”, and “Won’t Go Home Without You’) were solid songs and it was great that the band was continuing in their evolution as artists, but none of them made me rave about the album. Unfortunately, these four songs were arranged like this in the album, #1, #2, #4 and the #5 track. Since I wasn’t really into them, I usually would not bother to listen to the rest of the album anymore and just change the CD on the rack. So for a long time, I wasn’t familiar with the second half of this album. It was only after I did a review of Songs About Jane did I start playing I Won’t be Soon Before Long again, mainly to assess if my personal biases at that time have persisted almost 12 years after I bought the CD. Well, I still feel ambivalent about the four songs released as singles from this album. However, I was wrong about giving up on the album at that time. I discovered that there were several good songs in the second half of the album. I think they were not chosen because they were not pop enough and I think that was the direction the band was aiming for at that time.

The American pop-rock band Maroon 5 released their sixth studio album Red Pill Blues in November 2017 through 222 Records and Interscope Records. The title came up from the science fictional concept of red pill and the blue pill that originated from the 1999 film “The Matrix”. This was their first release where they featured their multi-instrumentalist band member Sam Farrar. The standard album has a total of ten tracks that runs for an overall approximate time length of forty two minutes. However, there are five bonus tracks, adding which the time length becomes approximately sixty one minutes. The album received mixed reviews from the music critics and listeners, with an overall average rating of 58 on Metacritic. AllMusic and Rolling Stone magazine rated the album 3.5 out of 5 stars, while Financial Times and The Guardian rated it 3 out of 5 stars. Other publications like Siant Magazine and The Times rated it 2 stars. Entertainment Weekly described it as the “best and most cohesive set of the decade". Taylor Weatherby of Billboard described the album as the most electronic production that the band has ever seen and they have managed to use that in their classic Maroon 5 fashion. Financial Times praised the smooth high vocals and the catchy tunes. Pitchfork provided an average rating of 4.8 out of 10, describing the album as “smooth, professional, antiseptic soft-rock, which somehow also features Kendrick Lamar, Future, and A$AP Rocky”. However, some internet sources say that Maroon 5 later regretted having the album title as Red Pill Blues which also happened to be the name of a very controversial Men’s rights activist movement. A significant number of guests were featured in this album within production, songwriting, instrumentals and vocals. The album received significant commercial success. It peaked at number two on the US Billboard 200 and Billboard Canadian albums, and at number one on Gaon music chart (South Korean International albums). Other than this, the album was featured in many music charts across the world and reached within the top ten positions in countries like Australia, Denmark, Czech Republic, Japan, New Zealand, Norway and Slovakia. The artwork concept of the album is also very interesting, which shows all the seven members of the band pictured on Polaroid photographs with Snapchat filters, which have become a mainstream social media culture. Overall, being a mainstream pop album, it can be said that it has already received significant success.

In the year of 2002, I came across an album called Songs About Jane the name of the band: Maroon 5, to be honest, it caught my attention for several reasons, it was an album that featured outstanding performances by all members of the band, a singer with a voice not very versatile but original, and interesting topics with details that did not necessarily intend to comply with the commercial rules. Before pleasing everyone, Maroon 5 wanted to please himself. That is the key for a group to stand out, first of all, to satisfy their own needs and feel happy with the result of their effort embodied in the album, the rest will come later. At that time, I thought that the future of the band would be the production of songs with higher quality, that their evolution would be great and that of course, the commercial success would also be part of their reward. I imagined (as I imagine now) that all musicians who struggle with all their might during their adolescence and youth to reach a place in the public's taste, dream that, at the moment when money enters their pockets, the opportunities for refining and for perfecting their style by playing one or several instruments, as well as singing, will open up and you will not lose a single opportunity to grow musically and artistically. Having the time and economic tranquility to listen to more music, take classes within their discipline, expand the repertoire of instruments, gain knowledge to improve the sound you are looking for and relate to innovative recording techniques is pure gold. Enriching yourself individually increases the value of the band. There are great examples of this, and the truth is a reason to give a wide recognition to all those musicians who capture their evolution and love of music, and to their band in each new album they deliver. Of course, every star of Pop and Rock, as well as other musical styles, also looks forward to the moment of success and the arrival of money, for parties and girls, is part of the dream of every young person who wants to make a career in music, but it's not everything. There are those who also dream of social activism and the performance of other artistic expressions and I believe that everything is valid. What I think is reprehensible, is to let the future reach you and you can not show anything better than what you did at the beginning or, worse, show a clear setback in your quality as an artist and make it clear that the only thing that mattered was the commercial success. It's disappointing when you see something like that. I think that is the case with Maroon 5.