Bounce - Now and then
 

I'm just listening to the Bounce album, and right now I think its way better then I thought back then. Give a listen to the Bounce and tell me, do you now think that its a better album then you thought back then?

Agreed much better now... Altho for me its like that with most of the bands records since Crush.. They grow and I always like them better years down the line

great album then and now,I love that album,they should only include some of the bonus songs on the album like Lucky,Standing,Another Reason To Believe,Breathe,We Can Dance and some of the album exclude like Joey,Right side or wrong,Open all night,You had me from hello!

There's some good rockers on there but as an album it's hampered by too many poor ballads and lacklustre storytellers like Joey.

A good album has to play well as a whole and Bounce definitely doesn't.

I listened to it for the first time in a while the other day: the production is AMAZING. Some great songs, some poor songs, but please listen to the production...it's hard when it needs to be and so organic also (had me from hello)


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Yeah I agree, it's got a great sound to it, so much better than the shanks records, but like others say, it's got too many weaker slower songs. The more upbeat stuff is great. Would love to hear the recent stuff sounding like this...it would make a huge difference....

sad, but no. album is soo pop and sweet, like a candy.

I answered no, simply because I always liked Bounce and don't get all the negativity it's received around here. In fact, my list of best and worst tracks would probably get a lot of criticism on here as well ;-) For example I really love Joey, You Had Me From Hello and Right Side Of Wrong, but don't like Bounce (the song) that much. But it's just me, baby ;-)

i still don't get it. The Distance and Love Me Back To Life, both has probably the similar intro, ironic, like at the new album, THINFS song and God Bless This Mess intro?

I really like 4-5 songs off Bounce. I can't stand Joey or You Had Me From Hello. The rest are ok. That was pretty much how I felt back then too.

Whenever I listen to the album I still skip several tracks.


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I think Bounce is ok for a post 2000 album. Very uneven. But ok.

And I think I like it a bit more now than then.



The song Bounce is quite bad. Very rickymartiny. And I also can't listen to AALY, too fake and dont wannna miss a thing ripoff.

On the contrary I have grown to like Everyday much, and much more than then. The acoustic version of Everyday (the b-side, not TLFR), is really cool and funny.

Open all night, though very mellow, is very good.

And all the rest are good, fun even if they are very popish at times. I agree with the previous mentioning of the sound: yes it sounds really good, and when you have 5 musicians of the quality of Jon, Richie, Dave, Hugh & Tico, and you record their input in a natural, organic way, even with mediocre compositions will come out entertaining.

I'm voting no because I thought it was an amazing album when it was released and I still think it now. I really love most of the songs there, including the ballads. With Crush I discovered this band but These Days and Bounce were the records that really got me (got them at the same time).

No. I loved it back then and I still love it today.
It's the album I became a fan with.

Well I wasn't a fan back then (I was 8, lol), but I think it's one of their weakest hours, even by post-TD standards. Some bright moments there, sure (probably their last several attempts at a commercially friendly ballad), but Luke Ebbin's production on heavy songs is atrocious (makes Shanks sound like Timbaland or something) and as most have pointed out, it's terribly inconsistent - I believe the album needs 2 or 3 directions to be consistent and have a theme and here it feels there are like 6 different directions or something.

I answered "yes," because in the years since release: I fell in love with "Open All Night." The ballads as a whole hampered the album for me, as it does for many here. I'm still not a fan of YHMFH and AALY. They are both super sugary. Open All Night, on the other hand, is not. It's just by the time you get to it as the last track on the album, it's one more ballad on top of the others and it's too easy to just hit pause/stop at that point. It also didn't help that two additional songs with the same title followed on the box set, leading to unfair comparison when they really just shared a song title.

Barring the two super-sugary ballads and perhaps Love Me Back To Life (not terrible, but just doesn't hold up for me) the rest of the album has aged well. I've always been a fan of Right Side of Wrong. I was slow to accept Joey, but enjoy it more now than I did at the time.

I quite enjoy Bounce. It's equal with Crush for me, maybe even a little bit better. Both have great tracks, but I think they both suffer from a lot of fillers or sub standard songs.

I mean could you imagine if we had gotten just one album with the following track listing...

01. It's My Life
02. Undivided
03. Say it Isn't So
04. Misunderstood
05. Next 100 Years
06. Thank You For Loving Me
07. The Distance
08. Just Older
09. Bounce
10. Hook Me Up
11. Everyday
12. One Wild Night

I think that's what separates the older albums with the post-2000 albums. You could probably find one or two songs on the SWW-TD albums that you'd want to replace, but not half of an entire album like Crush, Bounce, HAND etc.

But I digress. Back on topic, yes I think I do like Bounce more now than when I first listened to it. I even enjoy some of the tracks that most people dislike such as Joey and All About Lovin' You. For me, You Had Me From Hello and Open All Night are the only two tracks I don't particularly enjoy. And I guess I have to be in the mood to listen to Right Side of Wrong.

Bounce - Now and then
 

I answered just "Yes" because my opinion has not changed since 2002. Not as good as the 1984-1995 albums but an initial improvement over Crush. I was more floored by Bounce at first listen than it's predecessor. It's still my favourite post-2000 album of theirs and it's the one I revisit the most. I've always like the album, maybe not as a whole as it is very uneven, but of the last 7 albums it has the strongest songs for me, and more of them.

Like Purist said, the album feels bogged down with sugary, made-for-TV style ballads that do nothing for me but "Open All Night" is the most genuine and honest. It's easy for this song to be overshadowed by the other ballads because by the time you get to this song, you've had enough of them. I do like the poppier "Misunderstood" and "Joey" is alright and I think some people here are way to harsh on this song. It's a poor attempt at "storytelling", yes, but it's not a bad song.

The album as a whole, does hold up very well. It's aged better than the albums that were to follow (and yes, that includes Have a Nice Day) and baring in mind the fact that it was largely a 9/11 inspired album. It still sounds quite fresh and I do like the production, despite the over-compression and too-much-going-on effects at times. (The Super Audio CD sounds much better btw) I was glad that there were less studio effects included on Have Nice Day but Bounce had that harder rock edge.

I said in a previous thread that out of the last 7 albums, Bounce sounds like the band are having the most fun with it. There's an energy about it that was lacking even with Crush and with what was to follow. The B-Sides were great for the most part and I could go on about which songs I would replace the album tracks with but I wouldn't change the album despite its faults.

When Bounce was good it was good.
When awful it was really awful

i still like what I liked back then its an OK album

I never liked AALY, YHMFH, RSOW and I still dont.

You must be kidding!!!! Those drums sound like they're going to beat you up, the guitars, strings...I recommend you listen again on a decent stereo.
All Shank's stuff sounds like toy instruments and waaaay too much reverb and delay


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Will never forget the first time I put on Bounce and Undivided started banging out through my speakers. Let's just say I was pretty floored. To this day it's one of the best songs ever done by this band.

It would be a classic if the best from the album had been mixed with the best of the bonus tracks.

Like all of the post-2000 efforts, Bounce is incredibly uneven. Although I like more songs (5) from this album than any other post-2000 apart from This House. Some of the songs are awesome, and some of them are just embarrassing.

The rockers on Bounce are miles better than anything on HAND, which many cite as rock as a post-2000 Bon Jovi album can be.

While I'm one of the few who actually likes Shanks productions I have to agree. Bounce is the last studio album where the band actually sounds like a band. The drums sounds natural, the overall feel isn't so overly compressed that all post HAND-album sounds.
Also it's the last one where the vocal sounds natural. On Have a Nice Day they started experiment with all the studio tricks that were available but on Bounce you still could hear the old Jon voice for some brief moments.
GREAT album.

100% agree.


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Same here, few songs that I like, and few that I disliked back then, and even more today. I don't listen to this record, but Everyday and maybe one or two other tracks do occasionally pop up on a playlist and I don't consciously skip them.

It's got a negative aura around it mostly because a good part of the record was influenced by the events of 9/11. I think they didn't let that aura influence them creatively as it did on These Days, which they also say is a dark record but delivered so much better.

I wish Bon Jovi had kept that attitude though, it seemed that on few of the songs they were not afraid to turn up the guitars and try to act a little "harder", and it was a good move away from pop found on Crush, but that's all disappeared since then and toned down for HAND and all albums that followed. No one's told Jon in the ensuing years that guitars are still very popular, even today.

It was a meh record, still a meh record.

I've always liked the record. It's a super darkehorse-ish album. You know those albums that were released during a weird or hard time for the band? Like, say, the Stones albums during the 80s? Or now, if Richie were to ever come back, "that one album without Richie"? That kind of stuff. That's a bit odd for the band. I always like those albums, because there's interesting stuff to discover on them.

The one thing that's NOT interesting about the record, though, are the guitar solos. Give Shanks' production all the crap you want, but Lost Highway and The Circle have much more intricate guitar work than Bounce. It's got a ton of layers, but it rarely ever ammounts to anything interesting in terms of interplay. But you know which song does? Misunderstood. BRILLIANT track. Not guitar hero-style guitar stuff, but great textures. Awesome vocal hook. Nice lyrics as well. So yeah, great song.

Undivided is definitely the best LIVE track from here and an all-around awesome song. Strong vocals by Jon as well. Bounce - I love the main riff. The rest is by the numbers, but they're super shiny numbers. Captivating drive.

Everyday is awesome in terms of the instrumental, but the chorus just never gets to 100% in terms of vocal melody. I actually like Joey, and Right Side Of Wrong has grown on me. Open All Night needs better production, otherwise it's a nice little ballad. Hook Me Up is okay, more works due to its attitude than to the actual songwriting. Postcards From The Wasteland is easily the best B-side, could have been even better with proper production.

You Had Me From Hello has a nice Sambora-riff, that's it pretty much. AALY is by numbers, and they're a little stale - it's no TYFLM, but it'll do. Either No Regrets or Another Reason To Believe was also pretty nice - I always forget which was the better one of the two.

The rest I don't really care about. That's just The Distance and its twin, anyway, right? Plus a couple of B-sides. Well, We Can Dance is nice enough, even if it's rather low-key.

Whoever said that you can tell that the album resulted from different writing sessions with very different mindsets is right about that, though - it certainly sounds like it. But then again, that's part of what makes it so intriguing.

I don't even have to bother making my own review, this is dead on what I feel hah.

While I like the song and think it holds up, does anyone else have ossues with: "That was my sister lost in the CRUSH."

I always found it to be an odd choice. There is no rhyming scheme that justifies the choice of a word that so happens to be the title of their previous album. Why not, "fall," or another word that was used more commonly to describe the event?

The crush is usually in September in wine country. And yes - it it called exactly that. The Crush describes grapes being crushed for wine. Perhaps Jon found a double meaning since those buildings did indeed crush everything around them when they fell. I guess that phrase never bothered me since it so eloquently described what had happened.

I agree ALMOST 100%. I do like and rate the guitar work, it mixes great with the talk box ('over-used'? Naaah) and strings. Solos are pretty bad though...shame; imagine Undivided, Everyday, Bounce and Hook me up with great Sambora solos...Distance too [emoji869]


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Never understood the dislike for the song Bounce. I think it's great.

Joey sounds forced. Like Amen on WAN. You can tell they are paying homage to better songs.

YHMFH is boring.

Undivided is ferocious. I've read people claim it's a "wannabe" rock song. Nope. It is a rock song. And a very good one.

Hook Me Up is good but gets repetitive.

The Distance is great. As is Misunderstood. (Don't like the radio edit/video version)

I don't know why I've listed them in a jumbled order.

Some good, some ok, some boring. B-sides better than album tracks. This could apply to almost every post 2000 release!


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Funny, how opinions can differ ;-) My take on the songs you mentioned:

Bounce: absolutely hate the "b b b b b b b b bounce" part, rest is ok though, but IML part 2/3/4/whatever

Joey doesn't sound forced to me at all, it's telling a really nice story, unlike Amen, which you mentioned. But yeah, it screams Joshua Kadison all over it (remember Jesse? ;-)) Still like it, probably because I liked his songs too back then

YHMFH is such a nice love song, played it to my wife at our wedding party. Can understand why people think it's boring though

Undivided is great, though they never quite got the vocal harmonies "right" live (always sounded a little off, whoever it was)

Hook Me Up is ok, a bit boring, but it rocks

I don't really like The Distance, melodywise, too much layers of everything, and so on. And I don't get the love for Misunderstood. I can listen to it, but it's the same kind of strange song like Say It Isn't So to me...

The live version has an outro solo, in case you never heard it :)

@Captain Jovi: Ha, nice! Thanks.

Agreed on The Distance. Song sounds bloated more than epic to me.

Misunderstood is just pure Dizzy Up The Girl-era Goo Goo Dolls worship, and I'm totally fine with that. Having a bazillion of songwriters it's not quite as spontaneous and intimate as, for example, Slide, but it's a damn fine pop song.

Given this a listen again after a while thanks to this thread.

Stands up pretty well after 14yrs for me. Maybe not one I'd want to see live in its entirety, but enjoyable.

What I'd forgotten was the strings arrangements (Ebbin orchestrated I think?) and the stronger keyboard/piano. Makes me wish Ebbin had got more cracks at producing

for me bounce will always be a missed opportunity by bj, they had crush, 2 big tours, a great comeback and if bounce was a great album they would be on top of the world...instead it was forced, some songs like the distance, hook me up and misunderstood are very good but many also are really weak.
for me bounce was uninspired, they should work harder on it or work less...they stopped the process in the wrong note...in a way it feels like they approached the whole project with a dishonest way...its good enough for the fans and the average rock listener...all about loving u???bounce??everyday???many cliches, jon unfocused between acting and singing....
the guy who wrote these days and destination and couple years back cant believe he wrote that record...crush had its weak points but it was obvious the big hiatus took the momentum, bounce could and should be better...
so i always listen to the album with a bit of bitterness...to be honest..
as seb has stated its true that sambora was on fire on that tour and never played like that since on a touring base, his playing deteriorated since then, the last years its his worst...

ps1.joey is a ripp off from levon...make a cover jon, i dont get why you pay homage like that...amen falls in the same category...cant believe he recently said it is one of his best ballads...fgs....
ps2.right side of wrong had some potential even if it was way cheesy...anyway that choreography jon did during some live performances when he "acted" ...no words...one of the low points by bj ever for me...really...

I think I'm one of the ones that fell in love with the album right away, I must have listened to it on repeat for weeks and maybe even months. There was something so dynamic about it, energetic about the live promo tour before the album's release that we haven't really seen since. The weeks leading up to its release were a great time to be a Jovi fan. That said, the album hasn't aged as well for me, Undivided, Everyday, The Distance, Love me back to life and Open all Night I still love, Right side of Wrong I used to like I now love, the rest have gone down a bit for me.

Edit to add: Postcards from the Wasteland is one of the most underrated, amazing songs the band have ever or will ever do!! That lyrics gets me every time and that melancholy groove, I know a lot of people say it could have been an amazing song if they had worked on it a bit more but no, for me it is perfect like it is....

Hmm Bounce...
Let see:

AMAZING/BRILIANT SONGS: Undivided, Another Reason To Believe

FANTASTIC SONGS: Bounce, Hook Me Up, Everyday, Misunderstood, All About Loving You (Maybe demo is even better), Open All Night, No Regrets, Standing, We Can Dance

VERY GOOD SONGS: Breathe, Joey, Lucky, Postcards From Westeland

GOOD SONGS: The Distance, Alive,

NOTHING SPECIAL- SHOULDN'T BE ON CD: Right Side Of Wrong, Love Me Back To Life, You Had Me From Hello

As we can see this COULD be fantastic album! But it isn't . Of course songs like Standing or Lucky are cheesy but I like them in they way they are.

Terrible choices killed this album for me. And choices for singles were bad.
Undivided and Another RTBelieve should be first 2 singles for me!

Was Everyday their last UK Top 10 single? It was number 1 in the midweek charts but ended up around 5 I think. (This is all from memory so not necessarily 100% correct)


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Joey feels forced to me because it's almost like it's Jon's own version of Levon - but not nearly as good.

I agree about Undivided live though. It probably sounded great in person but the playback always seems slightly off.


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HAND was #6 and WSYCGHome #5 if i remember correctly