In summary:

Bon Jovi return from a 5-year hiatus with one of the best rock songs of all time. They can’t keep up the pace across the rest of the album, but Crush is still 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 in it’s production, and would’ve sounded far superior with some of the studio heft used on It’s My Life (I use this track as an example because the band later did just that 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 an ageing rockstar.

It leads to some great songs.

These include the anthemic Just Older, which features a message about body positivity which was decades ahead of its time, and the cynical lyrics of both 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 celebrity.

And yes, everything feels okay in the world when axeman Richie Sambora kicks his guitar into shred mode during the hair-raising final third of Next 100 Years.

So there are great moments here, it’s just a shame there aren’t enough of them to spread over the entire album.

Interestingly, the lack of studio engineering means the songs sound as fresh today as they did upon first release, which is a great thing – however, they’re hamstrung by the sheer awesomeness of the lead single, and the lasting legacy for Crush will be 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. They can’t keep up the pace across the rest of the album, but Crush is still a solid comeback from a band who have been sorely missed.

Crush receives 6/11.
★★★★★★