Review Summary: This is more than goodbye.
So much for potential. Maroon 5's first two records, even at their most middling and disjointed moments (which were rare but notable), were thoroughly enjoyable and appealing albums in their own right. They were full of surface-level appeal, songs that popped along well enough in your head to justify being on the radio, all while having just enough intricate, funky, and complex elements built *on top* of the otherwise-simple tracks to make them stand out and demand your attention (the masterful "Sunday Morning" comes to mind). But something went wrong with
Hands All Over. That certain special something that made
Songs About Jane and
It Won't Be Soon such ear candy is... fading.
Hands All Over is downright tedious and frustrating in stretches. It quickly becomes clear to anyone with the power of 2021 retrospect and hindsight that
Hands All Over was the beginning of the end, Maroon 5's official turning point from promising, RnB-pop mainstays into the dead-eyed pack of cottage-industry sardines that we'd come to know and hate in the 2010's.
Hands All Over is a uniquely depressing album with all that in mind. But the album's not even... that bad. For the most part,
Hands All Over is merely... tepid. "Misery" is a relatively catchy track - synths and strutting, funky guitars intertwine together pretty effectively, although the otherwise-decent "Misery" loses some validity when you realize how structurally similar it is to the superior "Wake Up Call" from last album. "Stutter" is a corny, bouncy, summery pop song with a decently fun, shuffling beat worthy of a little toe-tapping and some minimal, in-the-moment swaying from the listener. "How" is an...
okay "inspirational" song with a static rhythm and a dreamy wall of distant pianos courtesy of Robert Lange, and "Give A Little More" is a serviceable groove all in all.
Relatively catchy. Decently fun. Okay. Serviceable. If that seems like faint praise, it assuredly is. Even at its best,
Hands All Over's songwriting is simply nowhere near the level of its predecessors. It shortchanges the ambitious funkiness of Maroon 5's previous pop endeavors (Maroon 5's strongest trait as a band up until this point) in favor of doubling-down of accessibility and cleanliness (the band's
weakest trait). Sounding pretty and well-produced can only go so far, after all - good production can never save weak writing, after all. And regrettably, the songwriting on
Hands All Over is *very notably* weaker than its predecessors', sounding downright amateurish even though by 2010 (after about fifteen years together as a group by that point) these guys were assuredly
not amateurs. "Don't Know Nothing" doesn't go anywhere interesting, banking on this overused synth melody and some half-hearted piano backing to carry the song (it doesn't); "Get Back In My Life" has an aggravating, chromatic melody that persists throughout the verse and prechorus; the thin, frivolous "Never Gonna Leave This Bed" is just *begging* to be used in some "touching", cookie-cutter popcorn-flick trailer, and the title track is a f*cking embarrassing dip into the pool of
southern rock of all things, sounding more like a scrapped, hot-trash duet between Bon Jovi and late-game Aerosmith with a hint of Lenny Kravitz's "American Woman" cover just to make it sound *that* much more canned and chintzy.
There is exactly one noteworthy highlight in
Hands All Over, one song that sounds legitimately good on its own terms without comparison to its predecessors - "Just A Feeling", a steady, lush ballad with, uniquely, one of the best *prechoruses* Maroon 5's ever penned, the warm, subtle synths, harmonic piano, and clean, staccato guitar bringing a shocking amount of emotional warmth and resonance to "
Sunshine, she cries, this is more than goodbye." I said before that "Back At Your Door" was "
a sendoff to the band that Maroon 5 used to be." And I think that's partially what gives the genuinely good "Just A Feeling" such emotional presence - if "Back At Your Door" is the sendoff, then "Just A Feeling" is the curtain call. For all intents and purposes, this swan song is the last truly good track the band would ever write, their parting gift to pop music before they sold out and started coasting on an easy, cushy wave of mediocrity, a wave that hasn't dispersed for almost ten years now.
It's a painfully middling and average album from a band that, up until that point, was anything but. The vibrant flavor and fire present in
Songs About Jane and
It Won't Be Soon distills into an almost homogenous collection of tracks that aren't entirely
awful, but are nowhere close to exceptional, either. It's downright sterile and clinical in places, sounding more like a subdued, lackadaisical carbon copy of the albums it's supposed to be honoring and embettering. No matter how you cut it, the reality of
Hands All Over is obvious - Maroon 5 was out. Their prime was over before it'd even properly begun. They were good, if not great, for a little while... and then, after this, they simply weren't. And that's perhaps the saddest thing about this otherwise inoffensive release -
Hands All Over pinpoints the exact moment they throw in the towel and sell their souls to the Great Mediocrity Gradient that's colored their output ever since. This is more than goodbye - when you look into their eyes now, they're not even there.
