Live Review: Maroon 5 at Great American Music Hall, 06/01/07

Live Review: Maroon 5 at Great American Music Hall, 06/01/07

Maroon 5's dedicated fans get close just as band grows bigger than big: Aidin Vaziri | The wolf whistles and squeals started before the members even marked their arrival with the pounding "Harder to Breathe" and continued more than an hour later when they scurried off with the one-two punch of "She Will Be Loved" and "This Love." You would have been hard-pressed to find more than a dozen people in the room who could actually identify any of the hairy men onstage other than nasally singer Adam Levine, but that didn't stop them from furiously elbowing each other out of the way in the hopes of grabbing one of the short-shorts the frontman flung out bearing the band's logo. In between the old favorites came a handful of songs from "It Won't Be Soon Before Long," basically the soul-pop confections of the last disc updated with extra fanfare. The live show still felt a bit like a work in progress, so at times Maroon 5 plodded when it should have been gliding, paying too much mind to its rock past and not enough to its chart-topping present. Fortunately, Levine's tabloid exploits with the likes of Jessica, Lindsay and Paris transformed the heartbroken verses that swept through the first album into pointed kiss-offs on new tunes including "Wake Up Call" and first single "Makes Me Wonder," as in, "And it really makes me wonder/ If I ever gave a f -- about you." Sure, it sounded fine standing just a few inches away. But imagine how really great it will sound in front of 10,000 howling lunatics.