Maroon 5, playing The Pearl, more concussive onstage and in person

It's the difference between a kiss and a kidney punch.

On their records, Maroon 5 is a melodically savvy pop band whose hooks are as comely and curvaceous as the leggy eye candy that fills many of their videos. Onstage, the band shakes foundations like colliding tectonic plates, a bunch of pretty boys making a not-so-pretty rumble.

It's a jarring shift, a fault line awakened.

"People generally don't know that that's coming, and we always like that," says guitarist James Valentine of the band's more concussive live presence. "That's been some of the most consistent feedback that we've gotten, ever since we started, like, 'Oh, I like your songs and the records, but I like you a lot better live.' "

Or, to put it more simply: "I think there is something to coming out and seeing a band perform their own songs and have that energy, have your ass being shaked by the bass rig and have your ears fried from the guitar amps."

But the thing is, these days, there aren't that many actual bands on the pop charts, which have largely become the province of Auto-Tuned starlets and hip-hop and dance tracks more reliant on producers than musicians.

As such, a group like Maroon 5 doesn't have many peers on the Top 40 airwaves.

"We're an increasingly rare breed," Valentine says. "If you look at pop radio, there's less and less of us. Any time I start talking about that, I don't ever want to sound like some old curmudgeon who's talking about the better days, the way it used to be. Hopefully we get to carry that tradition on, now that we're becoming old men."

Having said all this, Maroon 5's latest hit, "Moves Like Jagger," a collaboration with Christina Aguilera, is perhaps the band's slickest, poppiest number yet, something that does sound right at home on contemporary pop radio.

The song came about after band singer Adam Levine worked with Aguilera on hit reality TV talent show "The Voice," where they were both judges alongside Cee-Lo Green and Blake Shelton.

As Valentine tells it, the group was initially less than stoked to hear about Levine's potential involvement.

"We didn't know that was going to be a good thing at first," he says. "We were definitely very suspicious of this idea when he presented it to us, 'Oh, this might be bad for the band's credibility.' "

But if anything, it's had the opposite effect, giving Maroon 5 a clear career burst at a time when their most recent record, last year's "Hands All Over," has been a modest success, going gold but not selling as well as their previous albums.

"It's had a huge impact, because I think there's this whole other audience of people who watch TV who aren't exposed to music every day the way that some others are," Valentine says. "It just opened us up to a whole new audience.

"It helped a lot of people just sort of connect the dots," he continues. "We've had really successful songs, but you wouldn't necessarily even know who we were. For Adam to go on the show, it was like, 'Oh, that's the guy who sings that song and that song. I like those songs, I should go check out those records.' It sort of helped people put all that together. It's been a whole new peak in our career."

Maroon 5 has scaled said peaks before, beginning with their multiplatinum 2002 debut "Songs About Jane."

But these days, Valentine says they're better equipped to handle such vertigo-inducing heights.

"When I look back, we went pretty crazy for a while, in a lot of different ways," he says of his band's initial success with a knowing laugh that implies much and reveals little. "When all that's happening all at once for the first time, it's really intoxicating. All of us dealt with that, and I think we've all come out the other end of that in our own way. We're just a lot healthier now, psychologically and physically.

"If anything, we've learned how to pace ourselves," he says, pausing for another chuckle that seems to suggest otherwise.

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.