By Matthias Petry

After almost 20 years in the music business Bon Jovi have now reached a level of stardom close to that ultimate Rolling Stones- or Beatles-level, playing in the same rockstar league as Kiss, Aerosmith or Metallica. But instead of sticking to their guns, making good, solid rock albums, it seems they still seem to feel the urge to prove themselves in as many different ways as possible.

So they came up with the brilliant idea of taking some of their best-known songs and, instead of just playing plain acoustic versions, stripping them down to their bones and rearranging them. So what you get with This Left Feels Right is anything but just a "greatest hits acoustic" album -- it's more like completely different songs that happen to have the same lyrics as some good old Bon Jovi classics.

The first track, Wanted Dead or Alive, along with I'll Be There for You, is one of the still-recognizable tracks and therefore one of the better. It begins pretty similar to the original version, but then there comes the twist the title of the album is talking about: trippy, loop-style beats, some orchestra stabs and some fashionably distorted and compressed vocals.

What they did to the second track Living on a Prayer I still cannot believe. When they recorded this version, they must have thought something like, Well, here we have our maybe greatest song that has also become one of the greatest party anthems of all times. And we also have an amazing acoustic version of it. So let's take it, add some super-cheesy keyboards and strings and completely out-of-place drums. Then we'll spice it up with a mumbling, Bjoerk-like-sounding female voice and turn this brilliant song into three absolutely unbearable, boring minutes.

The new version of Bad Medicine, just as You Give Love a Bad Name two tracks later, is quite interesting though hardly recognizable as it has been turned into a bluesy-jazzy bar tune. Jon's '80s-style, "as-high-as-can-get" screaming on the original versions has changed into a husky, sometimes hoarse yet matching voice; Sambora's guitar work goes from heavily distorted Eighties hair-metal to blues-slide acoustics.

Lay Your Hands on Me has also changed quite a bit. Once a monster stadium anthem with a minute-long keyboard-and drum intro, a powerful background choir and Sambora's "check out my wall-of amplifiers" guitar sound, it is now a groovy, almost Led Zeppelin-ish tune that, except the whispery background vocals in the chorus, actually sounds quite good, considering how far it is from the original.

The rest of the record can pretty much be summed up in a word that is probably the first one most people think of when they hear the name Bon Jovi: ballad. At least since the mega-success of Always in 1994, Bon Jovi is best known for super-cheesy ballads. And so we should have known that they would turn as many songs as possible into ballads for this record; be it stadium-rockers like Keep the Faith and It's My Life or already-hard-to-stand tear-jerkers like Bed of Roses and Always, ballad it is, only that these versions lack the intensity of the originals and therefore end up being just boring. If you thought Always was already the most sentimental, kitschy Bon Jovi song there is, check out this version and think again!

So, to sum it up, yes, the idea behind the record is quite original and creative and there are some songs that sound pretty good. However, that is not enough to make This Left Feels Right a good record. The best thing it does is to remind you how good the original versions of those songs were, so it may have at least one reason to exist after all.

NW
MS