Artist: The Maroons
Album: You’re Gonna Ruin Everything
Release Date: March 5, 2002
Label: In Music We Trust

The Pacific Northwest is the unrivaled breeding ground for the great plague upon pop music known as “indie rock”: the most un-melodic, uninteresting, unenergetic music this side of death. Yawn city. But The Maroons are a whole new animal in the indie rock zoo, in that they seem to be highly familiar with Mid-70’s rock (Sweet, T-Rex, The Kinks), the essence of which permeates their sophomore album, You’re Gonna Ruin Everything. Guitarist Jim Talstra’s Brian May-inspired guitar licks on “Can You Feel?” are spot on, while Mike Clark’s Three Dog Night-inspired keyboards (on the clever “Dance Floor Flirt,” for example) leave plenty of hook residue in their wake. Add a lead singer, John Moen, who sounds like the gay reincarnation of Marc Bolan, and you’ve got a bunch of tunes that would be at home on the soundtrack to Velvet Goldmine. If the Posies wrote a rock opera about the life of a Guided By Voices fan, You’re Gonna Ruin Everything might be the result.

Official Website: http://inmusicwetrustrecords.com/themaroons.html

This article was originally written for Rolling Stone’s Online Magazine. Though Rolling Stone remains in print and online, this article is no longer a part of their archive and has been added to the content base of The Worley Gig for our readers’ enjoyment.