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Maroon 5’s highly anticipated fourth studio album Overexposed follows the extraordinary success of global hit “Moves Like Jagger” which was the second biggest selling single in the UK in 2011, with 1.2 million sales. This single as well as the Wiz Khalifa-featuring “Payphone” are both included on the album, which was recorded last year in Los Angeles with producer Max Martin. Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine said of the release: “Overexposed is definitely one of our most diverse and poppiest albums yet. We had a great time it.” Guitarist James Valentine added, ““Moves Like Jagger” was the first time we ever worked with an outside writer, so we decided to try it some more on this record. At this point in our career I think it was a good thing to completely mix up our process and it yielded good results, as well as a more collaborative spirit within the band. We wanted to make something that sounded contemporary with the elements of a lot of early eras of pop music. This is our most pop record ever and we weren’t shy about really going for it.” BBC Review ---------- Everyone has friends that don’t wish to keep up with the daily goings-on in global popular music, but like the odd update now and again so as not to feel left out and fossily. Maroon 5 are fast becoming their perfect band, being a fairly reliable and glossy barometer of how modern pop songs work – give or take a dubstep breakdown here or there. So if the melodies on their fourth album have become more fragmented and repetitive, that’s because pop music tunes have gone that way too. One More Night’s melody can’t go more than a bar or two without repeating – as if the band is worried it may forget itself ­– or getting stuck on a Morse code note for a while, just like a Rihanna song would. And if their choruses have abandoned the strutting cockerel heat of This Love in favour of the saturated rave bliss of Love Somebody or The Man Who Never Lied, that’s simply the effect of market they have chosen to operate within. They are also keenly aware that today’s pop does not require much in the way of unattended music. Adam Levine fires up that nasal yelp as soon as the song begins, and does not let up until the fadeout. Wiz Khalifa (guest rapper on Payphone) gets more space at the front of the stage than the rest of his band do. The exception is the Jacko-channelling (and distinctly old-fashioned) Ladykiller, which boasts an actual guitar solo. Otherwise every passing second is a vocal battle against a declining attention span, like a clicked finger in the face, forever. Even the sequencing of the songs betrays this fear. All the compressed pop bangers – worked up with proven song-finishers like Ryan Tedder, Savan Kotecha and Brian West – are at the front, so you don’t wander off too soon. If you think these factors combine to suggest a collective lack of confidence or personality, take heart: Overexposed boasts cover art so kaleidoscopically b and ugly it makes you grateful for the decline of vinyl. --Garry Mulholland Find more music at the BBC ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/syn//albumreviews/-/music/ ) This link will take you off in a new window