RSSNew Pretenders Album Surprisingly Bad
Oct 07
Music Album, Pretenders Comments Off
I love the Pretenders, but the new release Break Up the Concrete is just a surprisingly bad album. When Chrissie Hynde and company released Viva El Amor in 1999, it felt like a comeback album. It was fun, flirty and hard rockin’ made me want to dig into by back collection for Get Close and Learning to Crawl (both of which have been remastered and rereleased last year.)
Since then, though, the Pretenders have sunk into this weird adult contemporary vibe that (I hoped) came and went with their last studio release, 2002′s Loose Screw. That album just came off flat. Was the music bad? No, not particularly. It just felt one-dimensional.
Break Up the Concrete is worse in some ways because the Pretenders have gone from one-dimensional to unoriginal. There’s nothing here that we haven’t heard from them before. Worse because there is nothing fun about this album. The songs move along like sludge. There isn’t that amazing romantic track (I’ll Stand by You from Last of the Independents,) or the f-u song (Viva el Amor‘s Popstar - “your girlfriend wants to be a popstar, and kick the charts out of me.”)
The album kicks off with the head scratcher Boots of Chinese Plastic and meanders its way along through some uneventful tunes with titles like Don’t Cut Your Hair and Almost Perfect the latter cut where Hynde is almost mumbling into the mic about love and doubts. Coming at the end of the album, the title track at least injects some much needed energy into the album, but the damage is done by then. If I hadn’t been reviewing the album, I never would have listened that long.
