V

It's hard to care about any shortcomings when the tunes are as masterfully crisp as they are on much of V.

The best moments on V are when Maroon 5 embrace the tuneful, slightly soulful adult contemporary pop band they've always been.

Maroon 5 may not be breaking any boundaries, but as long as they keep bashing out hook-ridden, catchy pop songs, we don’t think they’ll have too much to complain about.

Every song clocks right in that radio sweet spot between three and four minutes, and nearly all of them go down like candy, but collectively the final product is an album with all the surprise and individuality of a Now That’s What I Call Music compilation.

As far as lightweight, easy-listening charts pop goes, V doesn’t totally offend the sensibilities, and that’s surely more than can be said about some of Maroon 5’s overly pandering, less exploratory “pop-rock” peers.

It's basically just a brighter, better written Overexposed. It's just suffering from what people who don't understand pop think all pop suffers from - there's not a lot of depth here.

On V, Levine’s song-crafting skills don’t live up to his ability to work a crowd.

The main distinguishing feature is Levine's narcissism, which gets uncomfortably blunt on Animals.

A series of precision-tooled pop songs constructed with the help of some top-level mechanics.

It verges on creepy at times – a mawkish cover of Marcy Playground's Sex and Candy neatly summarises the band's sugary and desperate audience seduction.