Review Summary: Jordi (stylized in all caps) is the seventh studio album by American band Maroon 5.
"Sugar" is not a good song. It's one of the most artificially "funky" songs I've ever heard, with an empty bridge that utterly sucks out whatever 'groove' the song vaguely established beforehand. "Animals" is a downright bad song, a track that sounds like a carbon copy of a
Fall Out Boy song (of all contemptible things), something that dooms the song from the start long before Levine's
actual f*cking HOWL buries it in the ground. "Payphone" reeks of out-of-touch unoriginality, "Love Somebody" has a groove so stale you wonder if it had an expiration date, "Maps" is downright gag-inducing. So why are all of these terrible songs considerably better than anything on
Jordi?
Because at least Adam Levine sounded like he was having fun.
It's possible that Maroon 5 was never meant to last this long. Maybe the plug just hasn't been pulled yet. Maroon 5's descent into monotony and dead-eyed drivel was unique in that the moment of descent had been there ever since the beginning. Most popular bands and artists' shelf lives go something like this: humble beginnings, prolific midsection with identifiable hits, and a gradual fade into either obscurity or 'indefinite hiatus' after successful middle life. Obviously, there are plenty of exceptions to the rule, but this is especially true in pop and rock music in particular, where lifespans are awfully short. Maroon 5, however, has been around for a long while, and they've been riding a steady slope of descending quality ever since
Songs About Jane, their debut that was probably a victim of its own success in retrospect, a debut that spoiled us by being too damn good. Their sophomore followup,
It Won't Be Soon Before Long, just wasn't *quite* as sharp and swaggering as
Jane was, but it was still a damn good record in its own right, with plenty of
Jane charm and musicianship to be had.
Shortly after their middling
Hands All Over and Levine's career-changing gig with The Voice, however, the slope of quality stopped beating around the bush, stopped creeping downwards and finally bullet-dived into the abyss.
Overexposed, V, Red Pill Blues, that
f*cking Super Bowl Halftime Show that somehow topped JT's on the *embarrassment* tier list... for almost ten years straight, Maroon 5's just been hitting us with worse and worse material, and their rough, aggressive descent from funky, passionate cats into unthinking, unfeeling blank slates has finally reached its apex with
Jordi, an album that qualifies less as music and more as depressed, robotic mumbling.
No one's having fun on
Jordi. This is a record that's been finely, expertly stripped of fun and personality, and it manages to hit that very precise yet very disheartening balance of soulless and downright sad. "Beautiful Mistakes" is the mechanical, uninvolved sound of Levine trying to sound like the rest of us human beings, half-heartedly trying to emulate those pesky things called
emotions that we sometimes have to deal with. "Lost" is the perfect name for a track with a shallow beat that goes nowhere, the perfect descriptor of Levine's particularly horrible vocal performance on this track - gone are the days when he sang with purpose and aggression, replaced by timid and meek mumblings that drown beneath the nothing production, production that favors volume over substance. By the time you hit Levine's utterly evil
falsetto Soundcloud rapper delivery on "Echo", odds are you've already tuned out of a record that's not even three songs in, and it leaves you numb to the pains contained within songs like the garbage Harry Styles ripoff "Lovesick", the teeth-grinding, "how do you do, fellow kids?" triplet rapping on the hazy "Seasons" (aka the worst Frank Ocean pastiche I've ever heard), the absolute worst hook they've written in "Nobody's Love", or the utterly wasted
Stevie Nicks guest feature present on "Remedy" of all things.
This is wretched. This is f*cking
awful. This isn't Maroon 5 anymore, hell, this is barely Adam Levine anymore, this is procedurally-generated noise that happens to have Levine's warbling placed on top of it. It's thirty-seven minutes of droning, assimilated nonsense, a deluge of bland nothingness that pretends to be a set of twelve discrete, original "songs" instead of a singular, long-running sound generator.
Jordi is a dark patch of pop music - it was so uniquely f*cking terrible that it kickstarted a Sputnik appreciation for the Maroon 5 material that was actually good. The only thing
Jordi accomplishes is the incomprehensible feat of making Maroon 5's material in the 2010's sound like liquid gold in comparison to this fish-eyed, nightmarish slog.
Jordi is such a trivial reduction of what made Maroon 5 great that it almost feels like a cunningly calculated crime, like a long-running con that Levine and his AI comrades have been playing on the music industry for a laugh, just to see if they can get away with the simple act of not making music anymore.
Jordi is alarmingly, indefensibly ugly, a grinding, pointless cash-in that exists for the sake of a paycheck and nothing more. It's the death knell of a musical bourgeoisie that has finally run out of time. If Maroon 5's gravestone had a song, I imagine it would sound quite a bit like
Jordi.
