Review Summary: Rock bottom
Jordi is a Maroon 5 album. It's also
not a Maroon 5 album. How can both things be true at the same time? Well, it
is a Maroon 5 album to the extent that the artwork bares the familiar moniker's name, and it's the
kind of album the guys who comprise the 'band' would make at this painfully irrelevant juncture in their careers. It's also
not a Maroon 5 album to the extent that to call it such is an insult to the band they used to be, and the short-lived but brilliant run of albums they churned out in their first several years in the mainstream.
Jordi is the musical equivalent of a war crime, and to say it doesn't deserve any connection —spiritual, literal or otherwise— to an album like
Songs About Jane or a song like "Makes Me Wonder" is a gross understatement.
In the run-up to this album's mid-pandemic release, Adam Levine told Apple Music: "We've made it. We're not trying to do anything to make it any further." How almost creepily telling that is; an almost Freudian admission on his part, that he and his 'band'mates have long run out of any ambition to drive to meaningfully create something. And that is
exactly how
Jordi, named in honor of their late manager and friend Jordan Feldstein, plays. The songwriting is barely surface-level and almost offensively out of touch, a morbidly remarkable achievement when factoring in that Levine enlists literally
dozens of outside writers to help put pen to paper. The generic beats and production are lifeless, insipid and hardly pass as being noise, let alone music. And Adam Levine's voice, once a seductive, powerful and even charming asset to the whole enterprise, has deteriorated so much that even his trademark falsetto cannot add any identity or humanity to the affair. As was the case with this album's predecessor
Red Pill Blues, the 'band' piles on the features and cameos to compensate for their refusal and/or inability to carry a tune by themselves anymore.
As we traverse through the deluxe edition's fourteen "songs", we cross paths with, among others, Blackbear, Megan Thee Stallion, Steve Nicks, H.E.R, and everyone's favorite deceased rappers that they didn't know existed until they died - Nipsey Hussle and Juice Wrld. Some have speculated if
Jordi was named after the band's fallen friend as a means of garnering sympathy and trying to muddy any negative reception the album received. When you see them leaning on B-list verses left over from dead rappers' catalogs, you certainly can't help but lend credence to that thesis. As far as the features themselves go, H.E.R. makes for the most welcome inclusion. "Convince Me Otherwise", where she sings lead, would have been a sturdy R&B jaunt if she'd been allowed to go it completely alone. But this is a "Maroon 5" "album" so of course Levine has to chime in
somewhere. Accordingly, his continued attempts at blackvoice pour cold water over every last shred of potential.
"Echo", meanwhile, vies for status as the group's worst song
ever. I'm only too happy to award it that Razzie after suffering through Levine's painful falsetto rap(??) approach where he boldly declares "Novocaine! Thought I couldn't feel no pain!" This segues into a nauseatingly
stupid chorus where Levine's repeated words are altered on the grid to achieve an 'echo' affect (omg just like the song title!) but they can't even pull that off convincingly. Levine asks for novocaine a second time on "Can't Leave You Alone" (toothache must explain why he can't sing), which relies on discreet guitar licks because this is a
band after all, and the first few bars that could be plucked from Juice Wrld's estate at random. "Have you ever had a makeout session with death?" the late Higgins slurs on his 'verse.'
Lead-off single "Memories", the band's biggest hit without a feature in years and which doesn't even appear on the standard edition, is the proper tribute to the band's late manager. It's too bad Levine's performance is dull and flaccid, because it's not a terrible song structurally. The composition is stripped back and vulnerable, most likely by design, and is the only moment here containing any modicum of emotional intelligence. It could serve as a memorial for Maroon 5 themselves, as it still is packaged into an album that sees the 'band' at their absolute worst, when they have officially run out of any right to exist.
Jordi f*cking blows. It's the perfectly ugly culmination of everything we saw from Maroon 5 in the 2010s. "Moves Like Jagger" saved them from being another Lifehouse or Matchbox Twenty, so they tried to capture that lightning in a bottle again, with atrocities sprouting up in slowly increasing frequency along the way ("Love Somebody", "This Summer...", "Girls Like You"). There's no fun being had anymore, everything is calculated, designed to make money, and fulfill contractual obligation. Adam Levine, who once attended the same music summer camp as the Dillinger Escape Plan's Ben Weinman, can't even be bothered to make something substantive or innovative within the "avant-garde" hip hop he loves so much, let alone within rock music which he says is "nowhere." He's got more money, more writers and more producers than he can realistically know what to with, and an actual
band all at his disposal...and this is the best he can come up with? I almost refuse to believe it. It's too diabolical to be an accident.
Jordi is one of the worst pop albums of all time. To say that Maroon 5's next album, which is expected to be a return to a scintilla of the
Songs About Jane style of quality and writing, will be better, is not saying much, because it has absolutely nowhere to go from the grave but back up.
