Artist: Bon Jovi
Label: Island Records
Release: 2009
Length: 52.40
Rating: 1.5/5
Not long ago, Bon Jovi “šokirali” shocked the world with the news of a new album. For a band that has dutifully served up an endless source of frustration to its oldest fans from one record to the next, this was just another endurance test of the nasty, true-rocker-baiting kind, and Bon Jovi passed it with flying colors. The Circle is a sterile product of one-sided and, as a result, increasingly unproductive creative processes, one that tops everything Bon Jovi have done so far in inflexibility and unoriginality. Hooray!
If Bon Jovi were still capable of cooking up decent tunes for seventeen-year-olds’ birthday parties on their mostly commercially balanced products of the past decade or more, on The Circle that “gift” has finally abandoned them too, which is of course an alarming fact for anyone hoping to keep nurturing the band’s towering commercial status. Even by the low standards of the simplified musical maneuvers mentioned above, The Circle feels far too one-dimensional. Even after repeated listens, the album still comes off as a bland collection of half-baked songs that exist for their own sake and sound superficial, with no connective tissue and even less identity. From the last letter on, the album is a carbon copy of the Bon Jovi script we’ve seen for the past fifteen years, in which an increasingly pathetic Jon Bon Jovi jealously pulls every creative lever of the band year after year. Ever-grinning Uncle Jon has clearly lost some of his trademark elegance and charm this time around too, and the generic ballads “Live Before You Die” and “Learn To Love” might convince you of that pretty quickly. We can also take a merciless swing at Jon’s vocal register, which is nowhere near as intense and varied as those of us who’ve known the band for a long time remember it, probably because of the polished musical glaze the album puts on.
Bon Jovi keep us in the seeming comfort of simple and all the more unnaturally sounding pop-rock creations throughout the entire album. Heading toward some proper pop-rock wiggling, the gentlemen kick things off, so to speak, with the opener “We Weren’t Born To Follow”, which feels like a botched reincarnation of something like “It’s My Life”. The song immediately offers itself up as the album’s potential hit, and truth be told, The Circle chronically lacks serious competitors for that “prestigious” spot. The rest of the album is as samey as it gets, second-rate pop with no substance, here and there seasoned with modernly adapted rock elements that, as you can gather from what I’ve written, don’t exactly thrill. Allow me to point out a few unique examples of first-class banality. With “Work For The Working Man”, for instance, Bon Jovi stage a well-orchestrated rescue mission for the fates of countless fellow Americans whose social security buckled under recession pressure, which might be a rather perverse move coming from guys who have been driving the machinery of financially squeezing millions of sheep around the world for years with their megalomaniac touring. On top of that, The Circle serves up Jon’s extremely boring solo sighing in “Superman Tonight”, “Learn To Love” and “Thorn In My Side”, which sound too contrived, forced and unconvincing, more like instant recitals of badly conceived power ballads, and at the same time like solid proof that Bon Jovi are steadily losing ground exactly where, not long ago, they were by far the most assured. The moments when Richie Sambora wakes up are rare, and even then the guitarist’s sonic contribution is reduced to a minimum. A fine example of this “arrangement” with the top stud is “When We Were Beautiful”, which offers one of the record’s few guitar solos, but even that one is carefully wrapped in a foil of balsamic sound effects, just in case, and timidly calls out from deep in the background. If nothing else, the guitarist deserves top marks for exemplary behavior and for following his superiors’ directives.
Bon Jovi haven’t sworn by the grandeur of melodic ideas and creations that would speak in favor of the evolution of hard rock as such in years, so musically speaking, it would be downright utopian to expect anything too thrilling from The Circle. Whether that counts as a mitigating circumstance is debatable, but we certainly shouldn’t forget that Bon Jovi haven’t budged from their so-called “comfort zone” in years, and their identity has accordingly long since vanished from the radar of practically every even slightly demanding listener, which of course means the gentlemen have been long-term practitioners of creative stagnation for ages. So everything about Bon Jovi today seems perfectly logical, and above all, unbearably rational.
Lineup
Jon Bon Jovi: vocals, rhythm guitar
Richie Sambora: guitar, backing vocals
Tico Torres: drums, percussion
David Bryan: keyboards
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Hugh McDonald: bass
Charlie Judge: keyboards and string arrangements
Production
John Shanks, Jon Bon Jovi & Richie Sambora
Tracklist
1. We Weren’t Born to Follow
2. When We Were Beautiful
3. Work for the Working Man
4. Superman Tonight
5. Bullet
6. Thorn In My Side
7. Live Before You Die
8. Brokenpromiseland
9. Love’s the Only Rule
10. Fast Cars
11. Happy Now
12. Learn to Love
