The maybe man: a retrospective
Julio U.
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It has been more than a year when AJR launched their latest album: ‘The Maybe Man’, with 12 songs that talks about the issues that people have to cope on their journey to understand what are they, with the ultimate message of telling the listeners that it is ok to be you on a world where modern society wants to shape you to do what they want for you. This can seem like a great oversight for the album, but the truth is that there are still problems with their discography that need to be solved so the group can reach their fullest potential.
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As I write this, AJR recently has stated that they will launch new music in the summer of 2025, so let’s take a critical look at the past to see what we can expect for the future:
A bumpy start
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AJR started since their members: Jack, Adan and Ryan were really young, and we can see their evolution on the music industry since their first album: The Living Room with songs like I’m Ready or Thirsty: some of them were strange experiments full of electronic beats and some of them were generic pop songs; this weird combination wasn’t well received because even if the song you were listening wasn’t a total mess of sounds that didn’t match the theme or the tone of the song, the best thing that you could say about this album is that it was generic.
In this era, AJR was trying to be the next One Direction, thing that didn’t go well for them. However, since it’s beginnings we could see their passion for experimenting with the sound, thing that they continued doing 6 years later, and in 2021 AJR released their fourth album: OK Orchestra, where they had finally started to find a balance on these quirky beats; however, it still had mixed opinions because of its inconsistent mix between good, decent and bad songs.
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Now, it is 2023, and AJR has launched ‘The Maybe Man’, and everyone is asking themselves the same question: Will it be better than its predecessor?
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Act I:
The album begins with a grand boom, Maybe Man could be considered one of the best songs that AJR could have released until this point, replacing the common ‘Overture’ song that appears at the start of every album, Maybe Man comes to break their formula and bring us a song that serves the purpose of presenting the album with a perpetual crescendo that explains the struggles of a man that wishes to be someone else besides himself, because he doesn’t know who he is.
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Touchy Feeling Fool comes next as a really solid release for the album, talking about the suffering of a person who can’t stop being attached to his couple, talking about how he would do everything to stop feeling like this. Then Yes I’m a Mess talks about the liberating feeling of accepting oneself after being able to analyze one’s actions.
Both of these songs are good, but they have forgettable beats that remind me of generic pop with the use of applause and whispers to create it, something that affects more drastically to Yes I’m a Mess, making it the less memorable song of the whole album.
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The fourth song, The Dumb Song, is another grand boom, talking about a person who accepts and stops caring about the thoughts of other people who tell him that he is dumb, accepting that he may not be as intelligent as his relatives.
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Act II:
It isn’t a secret that Inertia is the fan favorite from this album, talking about the phenomenon of not wanting to escape your comfort zone even if it starts affecting your dreams, with a climax that tries to metaphorically represent an anxiety attack and a unique beat that matches really well with the whole piece.
After this point, the album seems to lose this effort to create songs that feel good, with a seemingly lowered quality on the melodies and the lyrics, with the lowest point being the block that is formed with Turning Out pt. III, Hole in the Bottom of my Brain and The DJ is Crying for Help. With themes like the complexity of relationships, the search for validation, or the existential crisis, respectively. These 3 songs suffer the most from poor writing and weird audio decisions that remind me a bit of those chaotic mixes from The Living Room, but not for good, things that make these songs insufferable at times.
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Act III:
After the block of the black sheep, the quality has an upgrade with I Won’t¸ talking about not wanting to follow what modern society says is ‘normal’, with a song that feels repetitive throughout all its duration because there are not enough new verses to keep it fresh and interesting. Then Steve is Going to London has the same repetitiveness issue, with a chorus that only serves as a filler for a song that's about the struggles of the band to create a song.
God is Really Real is next, and it can be considered the most significant song of the whole album, talking about the thoughts of the brothers that comprise the group as they see their terminally ill dad bedridden, preparing us for the end of The Maybe Man.
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2085 is the final piece of The Maybe Man, ending with a climax that references the first song of the album, showing us the final moments of the protagonist where, after living his life, reflects of his actions throughout it, understanding that not being him since the beginning was an error and talking directly to the listeners so they don't do the same mistakes, ending the whole story with the death of the protagonist, giving us the message: Be the best version of yourself because you will not be here forever.
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The Big Problems:
After hearing this album dozens of times, with different moods and at different times of the day I can say with security that The Maybe Man is a decent album, not great, not bad either, their melodies even if sometimes can be generic at best and annoying at worst, you can still hear them if you don’t pay a lot of attention to them, but I think that’s the biggest problem with the discography of AJR as a whole, just let me explain myself:
In pieces like Maybe Man or Inertia, you can feel how everything in the song, from the melody to the lyrics, all these details have been thought of to create something really good, things that can’t be said for other songs on the album.
And these are the details that if you put attention to when listening to this album will negatively affect your experience, details like the ending of Yes I’m a Mess or the start melody of Hole in the Bottom of my Brain are the ones that feel off-putting when compared with the everything of the song, and that’s why I can't say that every song is good, because it isn’t true.
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Another problem happen with the topics and the messages that the group want to express to their listeners, topics that even if they are really important and not that recurrent on other audiovisual works, at the end this effort of trying to give a great message is somehow ruined by empty lyrics that sometimes fail on explaining the real complexity of these problems or even feel that the song is giving you a really dangerous message, like in the case of The Dumb Song where some lyrics like “Your world is ending soon, mines a little better cuz I never watch the news” gives the idea to the listener that being ignorant is a good way of living, thing that can be a completely different message compared to the real meaning of the song that AJR wanted to express.
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Sadly, this diffusing message is all present on the album, like in the case of Hole in the Bottom of my Brain, where the lyrics just describe banal situations that fill this necessity of the protagonist for acceptance, lacking depth in its task of talking about this kind of problem.
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As I said, these are only details present on the songs that sometimes are only perceptible if you are paying full attention to them, but these details are the ones that are holding AJR back as a whole to reach its full potential and perfect that experimental aspect, so unique to their songs. A truth that needs to be said is that there is a positive tendency for this group to improve through the years, so there is a great possibility that it will be the case this summer.
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Conclusion:
But, even with these problems, The Maybe Man is a really unique album where we can see how AJR still genuinely enjoys creating music with messages that aren't so well explored by other groups. So, if you like pop music and you don't mind quirky tunes and orchestral instruments combined to the formula, The Maybe Man is a solid album that will give you exactly that, and who knows, maybe one of its pieces can surprise you on ways that you wouldn't expect for an indie band, just like what happened with me when I first heard it.