In summary:
Having been one of the few bands to come through the grunge wave relatively unscathed, New Jersey rockers Bon Jovi return older, wiser, and up for the fight. These Days may be inconsistent in parts, but it also brings us a handful of their best songs to date.
These Days receives 7/11.
★★★★★★★
“Are we ready?”, asks drummer Tico Torres.
“Just about…”, replies Jon Bon Jovi.
This muffled interaction kicks off the band’s 6ths studio LP, and it’s designed to let us know that we’re in for a different kind of Bon Jovi album this time around. Best-known for their distinctive brand of highly polished chart rock, these days (pun intended) the New Jersey rockers are older, wiser, and dare I say it, more disillusioned with the world than ever before.
These traits ring through These Days from start to finish, and make for what is largely a great listen.
Opener Hey God comes complete with a face-melting riff from Richie Sambora, and it may be one of the best rock songs they have ever written. Sure, its lyrics about never giving up hope are familiar territory for Bon Jovi, but here they are framed with a level of rawness and frustration which they’ve only ever shown on one previous song (Fear from 1992’s Keep The Faith).
It works very well.
Big ballad This Ain’t A Love Song (spoiler: it is) went on to become a hit single, and this shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s a good song which, although more stripped back than you’d expect from Bon Jovi, largely sticks to the tried and tested formula which they have been masters of since 1986’s Slippery When Wet.
This is an approach which is also used to good effect on Lie To Me.
Many of These Days’ tracks centre around Jon Bon Jovi’s perceived difficulties with growing older (chill out, Jon, you’re 33!), as he reminisces about days gone by and the world changing around him.
Perhaps we can forgive him for feeling old before his time, considering his band have already fought their way out of the hair metal scene, through the thrash uprising, and even the grunge wave.
Those battles seem to have given him an interesting reflective lyrical tone usually reserved for those far more advanced in years.
It’s best demonstrated on the title track, which sits nicely alongside their best work. He belts out verses in a storytelling manner similar to that of Livin’ On A Prayer, but this time around the lyrics are much more cynical (“No one wants to be themselves these days”), and candid from a band who have seen a lot of change in a relatively short period of time (“There ain’t nobody left but us these days”).
There’s a notable drop off in both tempo and quality throughout the second half of These Days.
Sure, it houses the absolute banger that is Something To Believe In, but there’s not much else to write home about, and falling off a cliff in such a manner ultimately prevents this LP from reaching the peaks of their previous work.
This is an somewhat unnecessary problem for them to have, because if they’d chosen to replace a couple of those sub-par second half tracks with mega-hit Always and the phenomenal Someday I’ll Be Saturday Night (both previously unreleased tracks which were wasted on a Greatest Hits compilation just six months earlier), we’d be looking at a mid-90s classic.
Sadly they didn’t do that, and These Days suffers for it.
Overall, though, (these Days) is a solid effort, and it shows us that the rock world will always make room for the ever-dependable Bon Jovi no matter where the current trends and tastes lie. It’s often referred to as the final piece of the band’s “golden run” of albums (which also includes 1986’s Slippery When Wet, 1988’s New Jersey, and 1992’s Keep The Faith). They decided to go on a 5-year hiatus after completing the accompanying world tour, at which point they were probably the world’s biggest rock band (albeit a very tired one), and despite several huge hit singles in their later years, they never truly re-captured the glory of this four-album run.
Russ’ re-worked playlist:
Maybe it’s the autism in me, but I’ve always been good at re-working album playlists to create a superior listening experience. What can I say? Superman got laser eyes, and I got this! So here’s how you should listen to These Days (1995) for maximum effectiveness:
- These Days (6:27)★
- Something For The Pain (4:48)
- Hey God (6:10) ★
- Damned (4:33)
- Heart’s Breaking Even (5:06)
- Someday I’ll Be Saturday Night (4:39)^
- Always (5:53)^
- Lie To Me (5:34)
- Something To Believe In (5:25) ★
- This Ain’t A Love Song (5:06)
- If That’s What It Takes (5:17)
- As My Guitar Lies Bleeding In My Arms (5:41)
^ taken from 1994’s Crossroads: The Greatest Hits Collection.
In summary:
Having been one of the few bands to come through the grunge wave relatively unscathed, New Jersey rockers Bon Jovi return older, wiser, and up for the fight. These Days may be inconsistent in parts, but it also brings us a handful of their best songs to date.
These Days receives 7/11.
★★★★★★★
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