In summary:

Bon Jovi return from a 5-year hiatus with one of the best rock songs of all time. Crush can’t keep up the pace across 12-tracks, but it’s a solid comeback from a band who have been sorely missed.

Crush receives 6/11.
★★★★★★

“This ain’t a song for the broken hearted”, warns Jon Bon Jovi.

And he’s right, it’s not.

Instead, album opener It’s My Life is a song for everybody who has spent the last decade yearning for the kind of air-punching choruses and crunching guitar riffs which have been non-existent in the rock scene since the first grunge wave hit in 1992.

Oh, and it’s fucking fantastic.

The New Jersey rockers were in an unusual position coming into this album, because having chosen to go on hiatus when they were sitting on top of the world five years ago, they now find themselves trying to re-gain the interest of fans who have moved on in their absence. They really delivered the goods with this absolute belter of a track, one of the best they’ve ever written!

In some ways, It’s My Life turns Crush into an inconsistent listening experience.

Because while the monumental power of its highly polished lead single is obviously aimed at attracting a new young audience to the band (see the video), the rest of Crush follows a minimalistic production style similar to that which was used on 1995’s These Days.

On the plus side, this makes them sound raw, which is refreshing in an era where everybody else seems to be obsessed with drum loops and samples, but on negative side, it robs a few tracks of the bombast which we’ve come to expect from Bon Jovi over the years.

For example, album closer One Wild Night feels almost skeleton-like, and could certainly have benefitted from some of the studio heft used on It’s My Life.

(I use this track as an example here because it was later re-worked into a far superior version. Check out the improvements on 2001’s One Wild Night Live album).

Lyrically, Jon Bon Jovi tries to keep it simple by re-treading a path which he knows works well for their style of music. He spends the bulk of Crush’s 58-minute runtime reminiscing about the ever-changing world around him, the joys of days gone by, and the reality of being a rockstar struggling with the aging process.

It leads to some great songs; particularly Just Older, which features a message about body positivity decades ahead of its time.

Other standout moments include the overly cynical lyrics of Two Story Town and Say It Isn’t So (which hit much harder from a band who are all too familiar with the smoke and mirrors of Hollywood), and everything feels alright in the world as Richie Sambora kicks his guitar into shred mode during the final third of Next 100 Years.

Overall, Crush is a pretty solid comeback album from a band who have been sorely missed. The lack of studio engineering means the songs here sound as fresh today as they did upon first release, which is a great thing. However, many of the songs are hamstrung by the sheer awesomeness of the album opener, and I have little doubt that the lasting legacy for Crush is to be remembered as “the It’s My Life album”.

In summary:

Bon Jovi return from a 5-year hiatus with one of the best rock songs of all time. Crush can’t keep up the pace across 12-tracks, but it’s a solid comeback from a band who have been sorely missed.

Crush receives 6/11.
★★★★★★