I can only think of one Pretenders song off the top of my head. I'm sure you've heard "My City Was Gone," which has a great funky bass riff. With that as my starting point I'm cautiously optimistic about this album.
My hope is that (The) Pretenders will be a solid rock band that just happened to exist in the 80s, so they have that poppy 80s sound but still rock just as hard as a band from the 70s. After the first few songs that assessment sort of holds. Pretenders doesn't feature obnoxious synth drones like most 80s music, and (The) Pretenders stick with with a solid formula- guitar, bass, drums, and low-alto singer. They mix up the beats and occasionally hit on a decent riff. I am not overly enamored with Chrissy Hyndes' singing. Her technique is to mostly talk the lyrics in a boasting manner. She does project plenty of bravado, but her voice is pretty flat and uninteresting.
There's a serious change on the album's second side. "Stop Your Sobbing" is much softer and poppier, sorta like today's alt-country music. Hyndes dispaches with her tough-girl approach to cheesily croon for a couple minutes. It's a very weird and sudden change, especially since I didn't have to break in order to turn the record over.
Oh, wait a minute... I just checked on Wikipedia and "Stop Your Sobbing" was actually the last song on the LP's first side. That makes way less sense. Like I said at least flipping the LP over would give enough time for your brain to potentially adjust to the very different style.
Anyway, I was mostly OK with the music, but this song "Private Life" is sucking the life out of things. It's a really basic riff that just repeats over and over again, and the chorus is way too simplistic to carry this song for its 6-minute runtime. What really pisses me off is the awful backing vocals that play over the chorus.
"Brass In Pocket" is on this album, and if you've listened to the radio I guarantee you've heard this song. I didn't know it was by (The) Pretenders. Honestly I didn't know it was an 80s song. I always assumed it was one of those alt-country songs that came out in the 90s. Then again maybe some country band did a cover version in the 90s that sounded almost exactly like the original album version. I suppose it wouldn't be such a bad song, if the lyrics weren't extremely annoying. I'm not even sure what part of the lyrics you'd recognize if I just transcribed them. There's a part that goes, "Gonna use my arms, gonna use my legs..." There's another where Chrissy assures us, "I'm special, so special, gonna make you make you make you make you notice." I just find that very self-centered, which doesn't work for such a laid-back song.
I was optimistic going into this review but I only wound up not hating Pretenders. The only positive spin I can put on it is I'm not feeling like I hate my life after listening to it, unlike some of the other 1 and 2-star albums I've listened to lately. So maybe I should bump this up an extra star just because I don't want to kill myself?
No, I still didn't really even kinda like it. 2 stars.
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