I think we can all agree that Jon Bon Jovi’s epic hairstyle is one of the few things to be cool in both the 1980s and the 1990s (just like his knack for writing catchy tunes, and his pronunciation of the word “Thay-engs”, which is “things” to you and I).

Thankfully, all of these attributes are out in full force on Keep The Faith.

This is the fifth album from New Jersey’s finest, which sold over 10 million copies and spawned an whopping SIX hit singles.

While these numbers would be impressive by anyone’s standards, perhaps it’s even more so when we consider that this was done during the height of the grunge wave.

You see, news of this impending release was met with a much more tepid response than the band’s previous material, and it was largely expected to be among the year’s biggest flops as a result of the changing rock landscape.

Not only did Bon Jovi defy those expectations, but they did so by delivering one of the best album’s of their career and, alongside the likes of Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, they were elevated into an elite tier of rock artists who were seemingly impervious to the grunge plague which was laying waste to most of their contemporaries.

There are several career highlights scattered throughout Keep The Faith’s lengthy 66-minute runtime.

It’s front-loaded with a handful of massive singles including I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, In These Arms, and stupendously good power ballad Bed Of Roses, while the title track Keep The Faith sees them uncork their best chorus since Livin’ On A Prayer.

Album opener I Believe also deserves some credit here.

At it’s core it remains a laser focused radio-friendly rock song, and it’s easy to see how this led the band to the eventual creation of It’s My Life, but when we look deeper into the lyrics we can see there’s actually much more going on here than just killer riffs and pumping fists.

Decades before social media, frontman Jon Bon Jovi openly discusses the mental health challenges of attempting to live up to the impossibly high standards set by Hollywood, and takes several pot-shots and their former contemporaries whom he felt were “selling their soul” by changing their sound in a bid to cash in on the short-lived grunge trend.

“Don’t look up to your movie screens,
Your records or your magazines.
Close your eyes and you will see
That you are all you really need.”

I Believe

“We were fully aware of what had happened to our genre of music in the time that we’d been away, and that we’d basically been kicked in the teeth by Nirvana and all the grunge bands.

I saw many bands trying to change their sounds to jump on that trend, and I had no interest in following suit. Heck, our sound is what made us so popular in the first place, right? But on the other hand, I also knew we couldn’t just re-write You Give Love A Bad Name either, because the scene had moved on.

So we got rid of the clichés, I got a haircut (laughs), and we created what I feel is our best album so far. The songs on Keep The Faith are socially conscious of the world we lived in at the time, and I believe that the pressure to survive in that era made me a better songwriter. I would never have been capable of writing songs like Bed Of Roses, or Dry County, five or six years ago.”

– Jon Bon Jovi

The experimental Dry County clocks in at a whopping 10 minutes, making it by far the band’s longest track to date.

It’s worth every second, too, as it perfectly demonstrates how much Bon Jovi has grown as a song-writing force since New Jersey (1988), and Bon Jovi’s tortured vocals are equally matched (maybe even topped) by axeman Richie Sambora, who uses the lengthier track to unleash some Earth-shattering riffs, before delivering what will ultimately be remembered as his greatest ever guitar solo.

The astoundingly well-written ballad Bed Of Roses is another of the album’s finest moments.

It’s a track which sees the frontman shed light on the difficulties in his personal life which had surfaced in the two year period prior to Keep The Faith, having promised his wife that he was “done with being a rock star” only to find the call of the stage too difficult to resist.

“As you close your eyes,
Know that I’m thinking about you.
While my mistress she calls me,
To stand in her spotlight again.”

Bed Of Roses

As you move deeper into the playlist you’ll find the ferocious Fear.

Written as a cynical follow-up to worldwide hit Livin’ On A Prayer (“Take my hand, I know we’ll make it!”), the singer replaces the hopefulness of the mid-80s with a bleak story of broken dreams which sounds like it was written on the rain-soaked streets of Gotham City.

It features the band at the loudest we’ve ever heard them, and it’s a crime that this track wasn’t released as a single.

Hidden bonus song Save A Prayer isn’t really a hidden bonus song, because everyone was doing them at the time, but it does contain a fantastic vocal performance which made it worthy of a place on the main album.

Not everything lands, of course.

Filler tracks like Woman In Love and I Want You struggle under the weight of Bob Rock’s crunching production values, and would perhaps have fared better as part of their late-80s material, meanwhile the poor lyrics of the ultra-heavy If I Was Your Mother derail what is an otherwise great song.

It’s an album which catches the band at an interesting junction in their career (dare we say Crossroads?), as they are clearly trying to adapt their sound for a more mature fanbase but haven’t yet fully shaken off their 1980s “bombast”. This results in several moments where Jon Bon Jovi’s expanding musical ambitions clash with his inability to save himself from himself, because 10-minute tracks and superior song-writing aside, he still can’t resist telling us that “Seven days of Saturday is all that I need!” (I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead) and declaring his undying lust for every woman in the world (Woman In Love).

In some ways, this jarring combination of backwards and forwards leads to many of the LP’s greatest moments, and even though they would continue to polish their skills on future releases, they would never really sound as great as they did right here.

As such, Keep The Faith is a resounding success.

Despite selling well, it never really received the media reception it deserved at the time. This was mainly caused by poor timing and even worse journalism (e.g. once-respected UK magazines like RAW! and KERRANG! each handed it scathing reviews for being “not Nirvana enough!”), so allow me to do the honours all these years later. Not only does Keep The Faith rank as one of Bon Jovi’s finest pieces of work, it also stands tall as one of the best albums of the 1990s, period!

In summary:

Bon Jovi moved into a harder, heavier gear on Keep The Faith. It’s an album which features many career highlights for the band, and the bulk of it remains as effective today as it was in 1992.

Keep The Faith receives 10/11.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★