Pretenders - Break Up The Concrete

To give you an idea of how great the Pretenders’ debut was/is, Chrissie Hynde has made a thirty-year career of it. Not to discount everything she’s released since then—I love II, Learning To Crawl, and parts of Last Of The Independents—but let’s be honest and acknowledge that it’s next to impossible to recreate the stars that aligned so perfectly on that first album.

It is a testament to Hynde’s strength and talent that we’re still referring to her latest incarnation of the Pretenders. And it is quite possible that we wouldn’t be speaking of her longevity had the original version of the Pretenders stayed alive and stayed the course.

Thanks to unnecessary tragedy, they didn’t, but Hynde has tinkered with that original formula just enough to remain relevant and just enough to keep us from entirely writing her off. One area of the Pretenders’ musical canon that, surprisingly, hasn’t been examined is Hynde underneath an Americana backdrop.

The ninth Pretenders album, Break Up The Concrete, provides us with an example of this window-dressing. The results are a curious blend of well-worn comfort and strange unease. While the real rockers are changin’ tires upstairs, bro, Hynde has made an album that’s as unthreatening as the music in the garage shop’s waiting room.

Hynde’s remained as one of rock’s most notorious lefties, but even the political diatribes are uncharacteristically tame. The rootsy instrumentation renders them as little more than as boomer hypocrisy, their themes deadened with the nostalgia of the arrangements instead of bearing real teeth. Even the ballads, which make up the bulk of Break Up The Concrete, sound lethargic and grown up.

These are songs that should work well under the new direction, and to some extent, they do, but only when you forget how well Chrissie could command a ballad without the aid of accordions, pedal steels, and Eisenhower-era recording strategies.

Make no mistake; this is by no means a bad record or one of the worst albums you’ll hear this year. It is, however, a very unsettling listen to a hear a woman who’s built her career on sass suddenly turn so cordial. With Hynde now staring down 60, Break Up The Concrete is the first album where she truly sounds her age.

This review originally appeared in Glorious Noise.

Pretenders - II

When it was originally released in 1981, The Pretenders’ II was almost universally panned by critics as reticent follow-up to their stunning debut. When bassist Pete Farndon and guitarist James Honeyman-Scott died after II‘s release, Chrissie Hynde regrouped with both grace and a creative spark that led to another acknowledged highpoint, Learning To Crawl.

Twenty-five years later, Rhino Records has re-issued the first two Pretenders efforts, with an additional disc for each that contain the obligatory bonus tracks. The debut really should need no introduction, but perhaps a re-introduction is needed for II, particularly since it would be the last album that featured the original line-up, back when The Pretenders were truly a band instead of a nomenclature for Chrissie Hynde. Of course, these past twenty-five years have featured a lot of disappointments from Ms. Hynde, which makes II stand as one of her better moments and one that ultimately didn’t deserve the critic’s knee-jerk vitriol.

When placed side by side, II does contain some prominent shortcomings over Pretenders: there’s some obvious filler (“Pack It Up,” “Jealous Dogs”), a few blatant attempts at re-writing the formula of the first, and yet another Kinks cover. While Pretenders jumps off the needle with energy and excitement, II sounds like a set from a band still reeling from the success of their initial offering while becoming comfortable with each other.

At the same time, II provides a big handful of songs that either match or exceed the expectations previously laid out. “Message Of Love” quotes Wilde before Chrissie re-writes it (“Life is unkind / We fall but we keep getting up / Over and over and over”) in terms that even an Akron high school dropout could relate to and “Talk Of The Town,” in a perfect world, should have been just as big of a chart hit as “Brass In Pocket.”

Thanks to some incessant touring to capitalize on the success of the debut, themes of the road pop up on a few standouts: “Birds Of Paradise” is a heartbreakingly beautiful song about a relationship being torn apart by distance, while “Day After Day” seems to suggest that, regardless of the difference in time zones, things will work out (“We’ll meet again / And pick up where we left off”).

The discovery in this expanded edition is with disc two, prominently featuring a live performance from the tour that features the band in top form.

The material from II is given a great kick in the ass thanks to Martin Chambers‘ kit work and James Honeyman-Scott’s subtle guitar flourishes. Both musicians are frequently overlooked by their contemporaries and the live disc demonstrates how criminal these oversights are and how fortunate Hynde was at discovering them and giving them an outlet for expression.

Seven months after the tour had ended, both Farndon and Honeyman-Scott died from overdoses which, by turn, ended the original intent that The Pretenders were “them” instead of “her.” Hynde had spent years trying to find this right balance only to have half of her musical equilibrium become another rock and roll footnote.

The upside is that the first two Pretenders albums established her own talents enough that she was allowed to continue, sometimes faltering a little beneath her original glory, but never embarrassing it. The tragedy is that the original quartet didn’t have additional recordings to examine, but the two that we do have are wonderful offerings. Chrissie puts it best in “Talk Of The Town” when she sings: “You arrived like the day / And passed like a cloud” but as the expanded edition of II demonstrates, there’s plenty of fair skies to enjoy in The Pretenders’ second album.

This review originally appeared in Glorious Noise.