Universal
***
Though you shouldn't always judge a book by the cover, this CD front will give you a fairly accurate picture of what to expect. Heavily-crafted, a bit on the pretentious side and not very original.
While their first album was a multi-layered offering, with songs honed into faceted gems over countless performances, this disc is just as crafted, but in a much more shallow way.
Hypnotic beats have given way to unrelenting drumming while deceptively simple melodies have been dumped for undemanding tunes and straightforward key changes heralding another turn of the chorus.
There are some flashes of brilliance, as on the first 40 seconds of Little of Your Time, or the unsyncopated beginning of Wake Up Call, but this quickly gives way under the weight of commercial greed.
Coming from any new band this would be an average offering, but from Maroon 5 it's unforgivably boring. It isn't so much a case of more of the same as more of the sameness.