My relationship with pop music is pretty much the same as my appetite for candy – it's more of a guilty pleasure I sometimes indulge in than something I regularly ingest, and there are only a few kinds I actually like; all the rest could disappear and I would hardly be affected.

Maybe it’s because I was young and impressionable and studying the earliest innovators of romance — William Shakespeare and Jane Austen — that Maroon 5 came along with Songs About Jane (2002) and hypnotized with their enchanting love-rock spell, and now the pop band has a similar effect on my musical tastes as that of Sour Patch Kids on my sweet tooth – in the right setting (usually a dark movie theater), I delightfully will scarf down an entire bag.

The panty-dropper-rockers' third studio album, Hands All Over (A&M/Octone), offers all the sweet and bitter flavors one has come to expect from Adam Levine and Co. from note one. The opening track and single, “Misery,” has a perfected Maroon 5 taste, with Levine’s soulfully sour voice belting out pop-catchy hooks. This album around, however, the band has added some funk into the mix not so apparent in previous albums. Hands All Over is filled with heavy basslines, propulsive beats and distorted guitars that create a groove-oriented rhythmic foundation, a sonic shift is immediately introduced with the second track, “Give a Little More” (video after the jump).

This article appears in Sep 23-29, 2010.