There’s so much wrong with pop-soul slicksters Maroon 5’s Songs About Jane — which, after an inconspicuous release in June 2002, has become a Grammy-winning, multiplatinum hit — that it actually ends up kind of right. For starters, singer-guitarist Adam Levine sings in a pinched, blue-eyed tenor that shouldn’t indicate much more than fussy Hollywood petulance; yet on “This Love” and “She Will Be Loved,” he works the instrument to dig into the itchy white-boy anxiety that surprisingly undergirds Jane‘s tunes. Ditto the rest of the band, who overwork their rehearsal-room chops — lots of gratuitous wah-wah, tasteful cymbal splashes, and oatmeal keyboards — but end up saying something semi-meaningful about the dubious efficacy of rehearsal-room chops.
This article appears in Apr 13-19, 2005.