“We ready?”, asks drummer Tico Torres.

“Just about…”, replies Jon Bon Jovi.

This muffled interaction kicks off the band’s sixth studio LP, These Days, moments before they launch into the pummelling riff of Hey God, and it does a good job of capturing the raw “feel” of the whole album.

Having been able to remain relevant throughout the short-lived grunge era by dialling down their “party rock” lyrics (and turning their guitars way up!) on the outstanding Keep The Faith (1992), they have chosen to continue down this path on it’s eventual successor, and the result is perhaps their rawest, most personal collection of songs to date.

Special praise needs to go to the aforementioned Hey God.

The album opener may be one of the best rock songs Bon Jovi have ever composed (an impressive achievement considering their back catalogue). Featuring a face-melting guitar riff from axeman Richie Sambora, Jon Bon Jovi delivers his vocals with the kind of turbulence we’ve only ever heard once before (the rollicking Fear from Keep The Faith).

It works very well indeed.

The track is noticeably more stripped back than any of their previous albums, and this minimalistic production style continues throughout the entire album, yielding a mixture of positive and negative results.

You see, on one hand, the lack of tinkering means These Days sounds as fresh today (some 30 years after its initial release) as it did back in 1995, but you can’t help but feel that it robs some songs of their full power. For example, the fabulous This Ain’t A Love Song (spoiler; it is) and the great (but not quite as good) Lie To Me are outstanding pieces of work which would’ve been real contenders for the top of the charts if they had received the usual kind of studio heft which people had come to expect from Bon Jovi by this point in their career.

From song-writing perspective, this is the album where Jon Bon Jovi finally gave up on his dreams of becoming a cowboy and started getting to grips with the aging process.

(Chill out Jon, you’re 33!)

Perhaps we can forgive him for feeling “old before his time” when we consider that his battle-tested group had already survived the hair metal scene, the seventies rock revival, the thrash uprising, and the grunge wave by this point in their career.

That’s enough to make anyone feel exhausted, right?!

So the good news is it appears to have gifted Bon Jovi with a reflective lyrical tone befitting of someone far more advanced in years, and his frequent reminiscing (maybe the album should’ve been called Those Days?) is by no means a bad thing when the bulk of the material is as strong as it is.

With this new outlook on life, the title track (These Days) takes the traditional Bon Jovi anthemic formula and turns it into something which feels altogether more “real”.

It’s tells a story of broken dreams and dashed hope, and you can’t help but be inspired by Jon Bon’s discovery that real success lies not in life’s riches but in being able to power through the struggle, while he pounds his chest about the fact that his band are the last men standing in an era of rock music where most of his contemporaries either sold out or faded away.

This cynical and disenchanted song-writing style runs through the whole record, and it’s indicative of a band who had been through a lot of shit in a short space of time.

“No one wants to be themselves these days,
There ain’t nobody left but us these days.”

These Days

These Days’ problems begin to mount up in the second half of the album, where the band simply run out of steam.

Aside from the absolute banger that is Something To Believe In there’s not a lot else to write home about.

It’s annoying that Bon Jovi face such an issue, because it could’ve been avoided entirely if the production trio of Peter Collins, Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora had made the decision to include mega-hit Always and the outstanding acoustic number Someday I’ll Be Saturday Night, both of which were wasted as “bonus tracks” on a Greatest Hits compilation which was released just eight months prior to this album.

Had they done so we’d be looking at a mid-90s classic right here, but the songs which appear in their place do not hit anywhere near as hard. These include Diamond Ring, (It’s Hard) Letting You Go, and the Aerosmith-like Heart’s Breaking Even, which fails to live up to it’s own potential via a clunky series of unnecessary key changes.

Ultimately, though, These Days still has enough quality to be remembered as a fine piece of work – and perhaps more importantly, it’s the album which proved no matter how many different trends appeared during the volatile rock landscape of the nineties, there was always room for the ever-dependable Bon Jovi.

These Days went on to become a massive commercial success for the New Jersey rockers, selling just shy of 5 million copies, and cementing Bon Jovi’s status as the biggest rock act in the world circa 1995.

Upon completion of the lengthy accompanying world tour, the exhausted band decided to take a short break which eventually turned into a 5-year hiatus, and although they created several huge singles during their post-2000 comeback, Bon Jovi were never able to truly recapture the magic of the incredible four album run which culminated in These Days.

In summary:

These Days shows us why Bon Jovi were one of the few traditional rock bands to come out of the grunge wave relatively unscathed. It might be inconsistent, but the highlights of this album rank amongst their finest work to date.

These Days receives 7/11.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★