With the rise of artificial avatars of legendary bands who can no longer stand the spotlight, the chances of Bon Jovi lasting forever are worryingly high. The one-hit wonders and toothless rock music makers return after a four-year absence with a threat. Forever. Like a bloodied Terry Funk, Jon Bon Jovi is here forever. Never forget it. This latest album is a reminder of life being in the dying horse. Pelt it for all it is worth. Passing listeners will identify Livin’ on a Prayer as the staple karaoke track of crackheads who bring their paintings to the bar and converse with them, arguing with their recent acquisition before making up and singing a shot of 1980s rock. In hindsight, the glitzy notions of Bon Jovi and the soft revival of glam rock aesthetics were a neutered attempt. An ambitious one, but dreadful. So too is Forever.
Open your heart to the autobiographical flickers, then. Bon Jovi perceives themselves as legendary, the title of their first track and the first of twelve to bore you into a comatose state of staring at the wall. A motionless forty minutes. And yet the opening acoustics and plain percussion sounds more like the cries of a Tim Burton’s Willy Wonka number. A song to be played when a fat child has fallen into the chocolate river, delivered by a man questioning who he is and who you are, like a geriatric in a mirror maze. Such is the mark of Bon Jovi at this stage in their careers. The stunted growth of rock must evolve beyond the Bon Jovi’s and Bryan Adams of this world. Hear the careful thud of looking back on a career which made the most of a lucky break. We Made It Look Easy is a tricky track, a hard one not to laugh at.
Bon Jovi can no longer sing the difficulties of rising through the ranks. All they can do now is try and reclaim a position they will never reach again. Doing so invents a turgid form of repetitive bluster. Bon Jovi is proud of their legacy yet struggles to piece together the specifics of it over this album hoping to parade their best moments. “This family tree’s got nothing left to prove now,” the incredibly irritating noise of Living Proof proclaims. Yes, this is the problem. Forever is made for the sake of it. Uninspired and washed-up recordings make themselves known by Waves. From there it is just drumming your fingers on the table, checking your notes and shaking your head every time a loose guitar riff is plugged into the many soulless gaps.
Flickers of lyrical competence can be found occasionally though not enough to warrant a listen. The legends, or those who perceive themselves as such when they are nothing more than themed bar fodder, are letting us down. Seeds has the same, similar-sounding riff as its opening track. My Beloved Monster had those same notes. There is a finite number of notes in the world and a finite number of minutes needed to be wasted on Forever. Even songs written for his daughter, the most intimate relationships of familial familiarity, sound strange and disconnected from the real world. Walls of Jericho is a painful listen. Much of Bon Jovi can be boiled down to the happy-go-lucky background music heard in the comedy films of Adam Sandler in the mid-2000s. Even the religious proclivities or wrestling references of this track are lost to the sludge-like tones of its upbeat emptiness.
Hollow hearts and condescending smiles pipe Forever full of the sickly displays expected of a band whose interactions with their loved ones and audiences feel completely bureaucratic. I Wrote You a Song hints at Bon Jovi shuffling away from music as he can no longer sing or write. If only we were so lucky. It is hard to find much joy in the shallow, muddy waters Bon Jovi play around in. Empty shells ready for listeners to fill with their memories or wave their cracked iPhone torches along to. Lyrically weak yet instrumentally worse. A cretinous album with the nerve to say its heart earnestly lay with the guitars of the past. Adams, Bon Jovi and the one-hit wonders of the 1980s struggle on, trying to serve up new iterations of an old sound. It reduces their star power and makes their earlier works look like feverishly lucky instances.
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