‘Samey’. It’s not in the dictionary. It’s not in your thesaurus, and it’s similarly unlikely to be in your ROM based Office lexicon. So what does it mean? Unexciting? Not exactly. Repetitive? Perhaps. Boring? The jury’s out…
But ‘samey’ this album is.
Bon Jovi love playing acoustically. Anyone who has seen their best performances in the last 10 years will tell you that, and for a handful of songs in the midst of a fist to the ceiling high wattage racket, it works generously. To stretch it across 14 tracks though, is asking a lot of anyone, regardless of their loyalty. But to their credit, Bon Jovi just about manage to charm.
Rather than bang out a facsimile selection of ‘hits’ that you or may not have in your collection several times already (on the ‘Crossroads’ Best Of…of 1994 for example)
Long Jon and his bandy brethren serve up an alternative take on all their most popular songs to date. And for alternative, don’t just read ‘acoustic’ read ‘bluesy’, read ‘jazzy’, read ‘slowy’. Okay, so that’s another word that doesn’t exist, but you get my point.
Opening track, ‘Wanted Dead Or Alive’ begins familiarly enough but wait for it, there’s a ‘twist’. Instead of the steady beat of kick and a snare you have some trippy, loop style thing going on, some orchestra stabs and some fashionably distorted and compressed vocals. You might question the legitimacy of the alteration, but it works. It’s totally unnecessary, but it works.
Although diehard fans may disagree, the reworking of ‘Living On A Prayer’ works significantly better than the original. It’s tender, more compassionate and perhaps closer to the original intent. Olivia D’Abo may sound like she’s singing with a mouthful of tissues, but she lends a husky and desperate weight to the central premise of the song: we’re down on our luck, but we’ll make it. Let’s face it, the hellfire thumping approach of the original and all the finely coiffured mullets that characterized the release were hardly a sympathetic reading of the actual events in the song now, were they?
‘Bad Medicine’ initially seems faintly amusing with it’s gothic and macabre vocal theatricising any former semblance of sincerity right out of the penthouse window, but strangely enough, the band have performed a significant feat: they’ve successfully rescued their rather safe and inoffensive brand of cock-rock with some neat post-modernising.
The trouble is, it’s too samey. ‘It’s My Life’ is a haunting ballad, so too is ‘Keep The Faith’. This would be fine but for the fact that Bon Jovi have already got their staple diet of heart-wrenching ballad in plentiful supply: ‘Bed Of Roses’, ‘I’ll Be There For You’, ‘Always’ – they’re all here. Far better they had the band twisted these into hardcore acid house numbers than to have stuck with their standard formula, if only to redress the balance, at least.
Distinctly more palatable for the discerning among us, perhaps sacrilegious for those less so. But while he can boast such a lovely head of hair, our Jon can surely not dissapoint.