Heard it five or six times now. I'm very disappointed but god alone knows why. Til now I've always hoped against all the evidence, that they could release a great single. Boy, do I feel stupid. It's average. It's bland. It's corporate. It's forgettable. It's banal.

The lyrics fall so far short of what even Bon Jovi can turn out. Yeah they have a bunch of cliches, but the singles usually have enough swagger to pull it off. These are pure bullshit though, seriously supermarket, chain-store, own-brand greetings-card bullshit. Delivered by someone just filling in the hours.

This band needs a break, or a management shake-up. Jon can keep the wheels turning, but it's no good if they just churn out dead-eyed music like this.

What really sticks in my craw is all this talk of brands. Using the 80s font shows that somewhere someone working on releases KNOWS that Bon Jovi are a marketable brand - I wish Jon had half the nous of the people who put together the cover art and then perhaps he wouldn't be serving up low-fat versions of Nickleback songs. That Bon Jovi logo suggests the heyday, when Bon Jovi turned out reliable hits. Yes, the general public see it as a bit formulaic, but that was the house style and it made their name shorthand for a whole phase of a lot of people's lives. What a shame it's come to this, boring, caffiene-free, tee-total music that makes the Jonas Brothers seem edgy.

I'm not advocating a return to the hair metal sound. That all worked because of the quality of the songs, and the sense of fun/passion/humanity that they conveyed. It's that bit that catches in your throat, the lyric that pops up in your head and gets you through the day, the chorus that you can't stop humming. All this passion is missing from releases like this.

I feel like the best bits of recent mid-tempo songs are the bits that seem like they could be auto-biographical: when you glimpse Jon and Richie in make a memory ('you can sing the melody to me, and I can write a couple lines') and When We Were Beautiful ('back when we were beautiful, before the world got small, when we were innocent'). I wish they'd stop generalising so much, stop trying to steal Nickelback's fans. I wish they could kick back and trust themselves to make their own album. One that comes from them, not their idea of the market.