Opinions

My opinion from Slippery to These Days is that the band put out some rockin albums with great lyrics and absolute superb music. The first two albums had some great melodies but a few of the songs were really weak lyrically all in all I think they were solid enough albums.

Crush would have been a superb folow up to These Days had the quality not dropped in the 2nd half of the album with She's A Mystery, I Got The Girl, Save The World (although I loved it at the start) the lyrics are just too predictable and maybe Mystery Train. If the rest of the album had of being up to the quality of tracks 1 to 6 Crush would have been some album.

Bounce was their best since These Days overall, only weak songs being Love Me Back To Life, Open All Night and although its a nice song You Had Me From Hello is musically a bit weak, the rest of the album is great. The Distance, Right Side Of Wrong, Undivided were probably the best of the album, its a pitty they got the singles wrong or we woulda had a far more successfull album.

As for HAND, the lead single was far to close to Everyday in similarities, especially song structure and lyrics. It says it all when one of the best songs is taken and reworked from the boxset. Richie's playing is good enough just not as good as what he's done over the l ast 6 odd years. The below par tracks are, Wildflower, Last Cigarette, Welcome To Wherever You Are, Complicated and the worst song they have done since some of the disasters on Crush...Novocaine, lyrically poor, musically crap and its saved from being totally crap by the decent chorus.

What they need to do is really dig into some deep subjects, back to the standard of songwriting of These Days, stop trying to create an album that will cater to what they think the fans wanna hear and try something completely orginal. They should be past the point of having any boundaries, start changing the structure of songs, have some epic songs again, with 2 or 3 solo's, actually create rock and roll for the next outing cause HAND was certainly nowhere near what they billed it as "There's not really any ballads on there, its mostly a rock album" then they have songs like Wildflower, Welcome To Wherever You Are, Novocaine even Bells Of Freedom. So please do something akin to what U2 did for their last album go all out and forget about treading close to any previous Jovi albums and make an impact. Ok my little rant is over but its pissing me off that Bon Jovi are nearly a shell of their former selves.

There's no doubt that the quality has decreased, but I guess its hard to remain original after 20+ years. The band have proved they can still write good songs but I guess when you're always gonna lose a little creativity with age. By the time you're about 30 I guess you've probably said pretty much everything you want to say in your songs. Unless of course there are new events that inspire you to write, such as 9/11 for Undivided and Dave's split with his wife for Novocaine. Those are good songs, but they are getting fewer and far between and the band are having to fill their albums with catchy bullshit songs like Last Cigarette and Bells of Freedom, etc. Prior to the new millenium the band was able to give pretty much every song a really good meaning and feeling to it. However, now in the present day they are struggling to reach those high standards and maybe concentrate a little too much on the charts. When you look at the charts they are practically filled with junk, and to be honest I don't really want Bon Jovi to be in there. As long as they make music that I and the other hardcore Jovi fans like then I couln't care less.

I think it's not terribly realistic to compare new material to albums like SWW and NJ.

SWW and NJ were the albums that made many of us fans. Those records created the BJ signature sound, they were the songs we fell in love to, cried to, pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and got on with life to, they were the records that first became the soundtracks to our lives. Because of all this, there is no way that 20 years later, these songs and records haven't been romanticized in our minds and hearts.

With that said HAND for me is the first BJ album in quite a few years that "grabbed" me from first listen and hasn't let go. I listen to it regularly, and keep finding litlle things, this lyric or that riff that I like even more.

Live, this for me is the best tour I have seen since KTF. It has that kind of passion in it from the band, Jon's voice is in the best shape I have heard it in a long while and Richies playing when I have seen them this tour has been pretty close to amazing.

i wouldnt say the quality has decreased just that theyre totally different styles!! i prefer the older stuff but i dont dislike the new stuff, i mean im only 20 so the first time i saw them live was in 2001 so i dont really know the difference in their stage presence. I dont think any album will top slippery but it just seems to me they're style has matured and mellowed rather than declined in quality.

my favourites from the new album without a doubt are dirty little secret ad unbreakable - i cannot believe they are only bonus tracks - i hope they play them when they visit sunny little england