Category Archives: Music – 3.5 stars

Maroon 5 – Songs About Jane

After having heard only the single “Harder To Breathe,” I was surprised by the rest of the album. The rock is a lot more funky than I had expected, with some of the wacka-wacka guitar effects harking way back to the late 70s. It’s still an overwhelmingly pop disc, though: in overall feel it’s a bit like Savage Garden with a touch of recent Red Hot Chili Peppers. “Harder To Breathe” is one of the highlights, but there are a few other glorious songs on here, too: “Must Get Out” is a sweet, energizing, sing-along ballad, and “Sunday Morning” is four minutes of pure sunshine. It has its fair share of blandness, but the album makes for a pleasant, undemanding listen nevertheless.

Lostprophets – Start Something

A fun, energetic, light metal album but not a terribly memorable or original one. The songs are easy to rock out to while I’m listening to them, but as soon as I turn off the music, the hooks and melodies drift away like smoke in a breeze. There are a couple of outstanding tracks (the single “Last Train Home”, and the radio-friendly top-down driving anthem “Last Summer”) but the rest is an over-produced mish-mash of modern rock and metal influences. Throughout the album, I find myself constantly thinking, “oh, that sounds exactly like A…no, it’s Good Charlotte…no, it’s Mansun…no, it’s….” You get the picture. That’s not to say that the fusion of influences is bad–I do like it a lot–just that it’s about as edgy and in-your-face as, say, Starbucks. It’s an album that will bring Lostprophets a lot of popularity, but it won’t earn them a place in rock history.