At the Pacific Coliseum on Saturday, November 3

What is Maroon 5, anyway? A boy band for discerning adults? A bunch of rock guys who make it relatively easy for other rock guys to listen to pop music? Or a gang of appalling sellouts with an unwavering bead on the business of wetting panties and emptying purses? Who knows, but seeing vocalist-guitarist-supermodel Adam Levine introduce the quasi-Neanderthal hairball that is bassist Mickey Madden–during Maroon 5's obligatory meet-the-band section of its Coliseum show–is all it took to define the maddening confusion at the heart of the act.

While a handful of young ladies in the crowd behaved like they were enjoying a 75-minute orgasm, the Maroons delivered an oddly temperate affair. There wasn't all that much mindless hysteria, even after a deadly efficient warm-up set from the Hives brought a crush of dancing bodies to the front of the house. The Swedish band's all-rhythm, Aryan garage 'n' soul revival is a seductive beast, and an extended motorik intro to "Bigger Hole to Fill" caught a whole lot of people off guard. Four songs later, with singer Howlin' Pelle Almqvist precariously straddling the stage and the security barrier, "Hate to Say I Told You So" had the Coliseum in its thrall.

Almqvist had announced that the Hives's mission was to win as many new "flans" in 30 minutes as they could (straddling the language barrier proved to be a little trickier for him, obviously). After finishing with the new single "Tick Tick Boom"– one of the greatest songs the Sonics never wrote–the Hives can expect a surge in flan-club membership. It made for a bruising contrast with Maroon 5's sluggish entrance.

Beginning with a tentative "If I Never See Your Face Again", a certain coldness to the Maroons' performance lingered, until Levine gave the crowd shit for its wimpy sing-along efforts during "The Sun". His bandmates used the occasion to deviate from the script, rebuilding the song from the ground up, and finally hitting the emotional pitch that was missing from the first three numbers.

The rest of the set relied on Levine's soul-man moves for maximum bang; vamping over the end of a gorgeous "Sunday Morning", for instance, or swishing along one of the two catwalks that formed part of the stage. When he was captured on camera against the deep black of an admirably simple set design, his freshly shorn head offset by a day or two of facial stubble, it was like watching Fashion Television with an improved soundtrack.

This is the same Levine, mind you, that expelled peals of vicious, Jimi Hendrix–inspired guitar and a few bars of Dick Dale's "Miserlou" at the end of the encore-closing "Sweetest Goodbye". Maroon 5's modus operandi throughout was similar; whenever the odour of cheese wafted from the stage, the band would suddenly snap back into its starting position as talented rockers who have mastered the foreign language of modern R&B. Whether the group has learned how to handle shows of this magnitude or greater is another thing. We'll leave it to the only-mildly moved flans to debate that in the meantime.

Link: Maroon 5 official site