The Maine - "The Maine"
Competent Pop Rock
The Maine are a band who have continuously evolved over their professional lifetime, starting out as Emo/Alt Rock back in the late 00s. The Emo vibes drained out of their sound by the time they dropped their fifth album, American Candy, in 2015. It was between this point at 2017’s Lovely Little Lonely that their newfound Alt/Pop Rock blend initially caught my wife’s ear, but the band would continue to evolve until their their eighth full-length release, 2021’s XOXO: From Love and Anxiety in Real Time, which was a surprisingly good Pop Rock album, with a few Alternative elements sprinkled throughout that nearly made my Top 40 that year.
Now that the band has seemingly settled on their sound, they’ve decided to finally self-title an album with The Maine.1
The Maine follows in XOXO’s footsteps in almost formulaic fashion. And this is, honestly, its biggest weakness. Pop Rock is already not an incredibly inventive genre. So the little bit of creativity evident in XOXO feels a bit more obscured here; “Blame” feels like a direct descendant of “Sticky”, for example. That said, given that “Sticky” was their first song to chart,2 it makes sense they’d want to channel that as much as possible.
Alt Rock elements are still present on The Maine, particularly on a couple of the more downbeat tracks, such as “The Mood I’m In / JSYK” and “Cars & Caution Signs”. These Alt Rock influences are really the glue holding the album together; as with XOXO before it, the sprinkled-in Alternative elements really help the album to not feel wholly unoriginal in terms of overall sound.
Pair that with the genuinely good melodic composition, and The Maine is actually an enjoyable listen.
In short, it is a step back from their last release, and it largely sounds like just-another-Pop-Rock-album, but it doesn’t miss its core competencies. It is still a good Pop Rock album with just enough additional composition elements to make the songs a bit more interesting. If you know a Pop Rock addict, send this their way.
Rating: Green
And, no, they’re not from Maine; invert that geographical location (within the US) just about as hard as you can, and you arrive at their actual place of origin: Arizona. The band’s name comes from Ivory’s “Coast of Maine”.
Okay, fine, technically they had a “Promotional Single” chart in 2008: “Everything I Asked For” hit #19 on the “Bubbling Under Hot 100” in 2008. This chart is, essentially, like a Minor League. A Proving Grounds. Only songs which haven’t hit the main Billboard are eligible here; it’s meant to draw more attention to lesser-knowns that may have some momentum behind them.
“Sticky” was still the first song to chart on a more ‘legitimate’ list for them, hitting #16 on “US Alternative” and #32 on “US Rock”.