These Days

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What you make of Bon Jovi's seventh album largely depends on whether you believe Jon Bon Jovi really knows what it's like to be "two paychecks away from living out on the street". These Days is the songwriter's leap towards Springsteen immortality. He fails, but that isn't to say the album isn't the band's most interesting, diverse and artistically rewarding of their career to date. The first recorded without bassist Alec Jon Such, it needed the characteristics of a "second album", following as it did the professional and artistic renascence of Keep the Faith. What they've produced is a side-step, a progression, and not necessarily an obvious one.

The title track is possibly their most mature effort, where "even innocence has caught the midnight train" and "there ain't nobody left but us these days". The dusty Americana of "Hey God" and "All I Want Is Everything" deal (almost successfully) with what can only be termed "social issues", whereas "This Ain't a Love Song" is one of their finest ballads. The hitherto unencountered diversity continues in the form of the highly charged brass of "Damned", which charts the anguish of infidelity, and in an ongoing religious theme, strangely absent from previous work. At 14 tracks it suffers, with the plodding "Diamond Ring" being an inexplicable and unforgivable inclusion, just as "Always" and "Someday I'll Be Saturday Night" were tacked needlessly on to their best-of Crossroad. Jon Bon Jovi might not be the Boss, but he sure is a king. --Ben Johncock