Review Summary: With higher highs but lower lows than OKO, better production but flatter hooks and lyricism even more self-defeating than usual, is this AJR's best album? I don't know. Maybe, man.
After the release of OK Orchestra in 2021, I swore to not listen to AJR again unless they seriously changed things up, because the AJR story of failing to grow up has become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy by now. This is a band so desperate for relevance that they were name-dropping Ed Sheeran and Beats By Dre, but only in songs that cried about their pop phoniness because they wanted to hang onto their indie pop credentials. You could see this in their actual sales metrics; their streaming stats are through the roof, and they have several Platinum singles...yet only one crossover hit on Billboard's Hot 100? Only one sleeper TikTok hit, when less hip bands like Ghost and Mother Mother have several? A huge online fanbase, but also some of the most vehement negativity in pop discourse, in an era where indie poppers like Mitski and Jessie Ware are just as respected as your navel-gazing BCNRs? That cuts to the heart of why I once said AJR occupy the uncanny valley of music; their sound is indebted to modern pop in the worst ways, yet they don't fit any contemporary scene at all.
And yet over time, I found myself making some peace with them. In hindsight, OK Orchestra was a step in the right direction, with a sonic palette closer to real chamber pop with some electro-pop twists and...less of their lyrical weirdness. I realised I don't mind AJR, or any band, singing about arrested development and their failure to overcome it, after a few tumultuous years in my own personal life and finding that life really is hard; it's a unique challenge that no one has a master key for. Problem is, the brothers Metzger have always failed to meet the moment in a meaningful way, or make their own struggles relatable or interesting as opposed to mundane yet still embarrassing. They're aiming for Twenty One Pilots' awkward adolescent vibes, but sometimes they feel more like if Rivers Cuomo circa-Pinkerton had all his self-loathing, but none of his irony. The out-of-place swearing and name-drops of other artists really doesn't help this comparison. And of course, the actual music tends to be very obnoxious and tacky, drawing on a lot of millennial and indie pop cliches but placing them into compositions with all the grace and dignity of Azealia Banks' Twitter account.
The opening title track does not help to assuage these fears on The Maybe Man. While it's nice to have an AJR album without an intro that just spoils every motif to come, and it has...less annoying pop tropes, they still can't help but throw in some dubs and wubs in the last fourty seconds of what is otherwise a completely disposable twinkly pop song. The album is generally much better at balancing some new analogue directions with their old tricks of jamming bad samples and pitch shifts and 808s into everything, but when it doesn't work, it's still so obvious a parlor trick that it fails to compensate for how simple the melodic songwriting can be. For the second time in a row, I'm stunned by the pick for their final lead single, because Yes I'm A Mess is just as rote and no fun as Way Less Sad.
Other moments on the album are better at demonstrating improvement, especially second single The Dumb Song, arguably their best behind World's Smallest Violin. A lot of AJR songs are loud, but not a lot of them are fast. A lot of them have a lot going on, but not a lot of actual human playing of instruments. Dumb Song thwarts both of these cliches, and it's close to the most exciting song of their repertoire, with a nice hootenanny beat, clear if too brittle production, and actual harmonies! That real people can sing along to! So many AJR harmonies are just stadium chants, or pitch-shifted chorus effects, but the Dumb Song offers a lot more humanity...outside of the bridge with another annoying sample. “You should not have done that”, indeed.
Similar folksy fun can be found on Touchy Feely Feel, albeit with a more sweeping tone. Even the synthetic kick drum is subdued enough to elevate the tempo of the song without getting in the way of the soothing strings work. But the best instance of acoustic instrumentation is probably on Turning Out (Part 3), a slower song that ekes towards Dear Winter's acoustic balladry but with a full band still behind it. It still sounds too twee to stand up there with the best of baroque pop, but forcing the brothers Met to actually play some instruments for once ironically puts more electricity into the production than jamming everything with after-effects. If only they had that same care for the rest of the album.
Maybe Man's Achilles heel is that, even with more restraint and soul in the production, the compositions have the same Xeroxed feel as the most sell-out pop around. Just because the 3-3-2 tropical house beat is less annoying on Yes I'm A Mess doesn't actually give it more muscle the same way completely upending the instrumentation on The Dumb Song did, because it's still just a limp reggaeton rip-off with too many calories but no flavour. Hole In The Bottom Of My Brain, another full dive into folksy singalong, fails to hide a weak hook. Even this more restrained direction has extraneous bells and whistles that come off more insipid than inspired. Ultimately, the sonic direction of Maybe Man is better than it's ever been for AJR, but the melodies are tired, with very few standout moments or catchy stanzas. It's hard to put my finger on it, but I think AJR need to be even more restrained with their performances. Leave some of the hooks only on instruments and not on vocals, no callbacks, let them linger and give them breathing room. But maybe I'm saying that because Jack still isn't a very powerful singer after eight years, hiding behind so much shaky falsetto. The Maybe Man's chipperness wears out its welcome when half the hooks feel soulless even at their peppiest. Even the lyrics of Steve's Going To London more or less admit the song itself is filler.
Ah yes, the lyrics. The bread and butter of AJR's love-it-or-hate-it reputation. On the one hand, my prediction of the band sticking to the same old and singing about their Peter Pan syndrome for the fifth album in a row is mostly correct. While there's far less weird pop culture references than usual, aside from one nod to Kendrick Lamar's Swimming Pools, and their perspective seems to skew more personal and inward than universal, which is an upgrade...it's still just a bunch of songs about these brothers reveling in their own immaturity. Like I said, I don't begrudge them for this direction on a personal level anymore, but they're plain out of ways to make this topic interesting. Without weird references to Netflix, Lego and marijuana that don't fit, it might be even worse now. Turning Out (Part 3) is the best example of this dichotomy; it's probably their best invocation of their core idea of growing up being hard when everyone around you has it all figured out...but it kicks off with a reference to Jack having sex? Not only do I not want to hear about AJR having sex, they've usually bragged about *not* having sex. Similarly, why am I hearing about a custody battle in Touchy Feely Fool after some weird Serial Experiments Lain “existential crisis as God” thing in the opening track?
Big picture, it's just kind of a slog until the second half of the album, which has some more meta elements. Lead single I Won't did not help my internal comparisons to Weezer, because it's basically a rip-off of Thank God For Girls sound-wise. But it showed the band using their usual angle of individuality and self-empowerment anthems, and inverting it to make a song about feeling artistically stifled by the fanbase they ended up cultivating. It's a bit rich coming from AJR of all bands, but I did appreciate it was a songwriting angle with some bite to it. Similarly, Hole...sees the band singing about their developmental problems through the lens of their success, implying that the road to fame and fortune and superstardom just made their drive for inner peace worse.
Unfortunately, the band's biggest deficiencies are found on what should have been the album's most serious song. God Is Really Real is about their dad spending 2023 on his deathbed, and the brothers don't have the power to care about anything else even as the world around them gets worse. It has some neat tricks like cutting all audio on the word “stop” and the song effectively challenges the idea of 'no atheists in foxholes'. But the melody is too simple and impersonal for such a dour and mentally taxing topic, and it still has weird references to AI and Elon Musk's space race when the song is explicitly about not thinking about those things, as if AJR really feel the need to be seen even in not wanting to be seen.
But the biggest lyrical flops, and the worst songs on the album, are Steve's Going To London and 2085. The former is this album's Beats, a self-defeating slice of total filler that scoffs at the idea of improving one's craft if it's all been done before. It crosses a line that I Won't toed and feels cynical in a way that is hollow rather than enlightening. But if you really want to talk about doubling down on dumbing yourself down, 2085 is literally the brothers singing about looking to when they're octogenarians...and they're still going to have trouble adulting. First of all, dudes, at some point, you just gotta bite the bullet and get a life coach. More importantly...it's more or less AJR admitting they're going to keep making the same songs, and the same mistakes, over and over.
It's ridiculous enough they think their schtick will get old in sixty two years and isn't already played out, but one would hope that they would have had something more interesting to write about on The Maybe Man. The best way to make their story of arrested development compelling would have been to demonstrate an actual progression. If they think growing up is hard, I would want to hear how they succeeded at doing it despite the hardships, or like Twenty One Pilots, more effectively highlight how the idea of “growing up and fitting in” is a myth. Or just anything! Instead, their worldview, much like their reputation, seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. They will not earnestly try to improve, so they will stay exactly where they are. Their life path, and their music, has a total lack of momentum. Or as the band themselves put it, inertia.
