Turn That Noise Down - Bon Jovi

So many well-known albums turn 30 this year and Steve Taylor-Bryant and Susan Omand travel back to 1992 to revisit some of the sounds of their youth that made parents shout "Turn that noise down!" This week, Steve tries to Keep the Faith ...

You don’t really remember how popular this album was with fans until you listen back after a while. People will always name singles off Slippery or New Jersey, and most will get the titles and amount of singles correct, but Keep the Faith is like an anomaly of memory because rarely do even hardcore Bon Jovi fans remember all SIX of the released songs. Probably because single 6, Dry County, is quite forgettable, but also because it came a whole 2 years after the first. Six singles though from a twelve track album, half of the album releasable as a pop rock money maker is pretty solid work by anyone’s standards and that pretty much sums up Keep the Faith, pretty solid.

The final album to feature the original line up of Jon Bon Jovi, Tico Torres, Daniel Bryan, Richie Sambora, and bassist Alec John Such, was recorded against the backdrop of a rapidly changing genre. The poppy hairspray style that had sustained the band through four studio albums and two solo projects was dying on its arse and grunge and a more serious tone were taking over but, if any band were going to do their own thing, it was going to be Bon Jovi. You can give the singer a haircut but you can’t take away what he does best which is fun rock n roll with some power ballads thrown in to get knickers chucked on stage and Keep the Faith follows the successful Bon Jovi blueprint in the main. With the exception of the title track, which had a renewed energy that was cool, and my favourite track from the album, If I Was Your Mother, which was obviously recorded after a marathon Beatles/Metallica listen session.

Keep the Faith didn’t reinvent the musical wheel but it did keep Bon Jovi relevant, which was no mean feat for a hair band in 1992. It doesn’t hold up very well after thirty years but nor do many of the band's albums. What you do get though, three decades later, is a sense of fun.

Image - Amazon