Bon Jovi

The pop metallers return to the big guitars and bigger choruses of their heyday with "Have a Nice Day." With each passing year, Bon Jovi get more comfortable with their status as the skeleton in everyone's closet, giving their new music an easy vibe instead of struggling to regain past glories.

Bon Jovi mean so little long or short term that it was only with this redolently entitled cheese bomb that I realized they hadn't actually broken up back in the fabled '90s. (Really--I took all their '00s albums for reunion one-shots, and couldn't figure out why the product kept coming in the three seconds I thought about it.) The commercial secret is as unchanging as Jon-Jon's mysteriously unwrinkled countenance--hard rock so inoffensive it's less Aerosmith than Air Supply. Not only is it impossible to tell whether the one called "Bells of Freedom" is pro- or anti-Bush, it's impossible to tell whether it's patriotic. A depressing argument for the existence of that intellectual fairy tale, the passive mass audience. (Grade - C+)