The Random iTunes Fairy does like to repeat herself on occasion, and this week she’s following up last weekend’s Maroon 5 post with another cut from the band’s debut album, Songs About Jane.
My remarks from last week remain true seven days later… this album represents the best work Maroon 5 has done to date and I wish they’d return to this sound.
The Head and the Heart are a band I expected would become a favorite of mine based on the first few songs I heard. Maybe they still will.
The Seattle indie band’s sophomore album, Let’s Be Still, has a great acoustic sound in the same vein as Mumford & Sons and Fleet Foxes — that whole hipster folk rock throwback thing. These days that feels a little obvious, but it’s still a great sound.
Despite Maroon 5’s bevy of hit singles since Adam Levine took to his red chair on The Voice, I don’t believe they’ve ever topped their debut album.
2002’s Songs About Jane is alternately jazzy and muscular, a sleek and sexy song cycle that delivers from its first note to its last.
The band’s recent music is no less catchy but perhaps a bit too polished. Levine and company have become master pop craftsmen — there’s little doubt that a new Maroon 5 song will stick both in your head and on the charts — but their music lacks the sense of adventure that typified this record.
After a couple of weeks dominated by ugly rap songs, it’s refreshing to hear a cut from Outkast’s excelent 2003 double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below.
This track is from Andre 3000’s half of the record (The Love Below) and, like most of that song cycle, concerns the many splendors of the fairer sex.
It took 324 Random Weekend posts before the iTunes Fairy finally served up a Wiggles song. I expected this to happen long ago.
And of course we’re subjected to a song by Captain Feathersword, the most annoying member of the Wiggles entourage, and the one whose name sounds the most like a sexual insult.
Meet Me In Montauk 