Pretenders
Break Up the Concrete
A vital, essential spirit pervades the Pretenders’ new album - the first singer-songwriter and guitarist Chrissie Hynde has recorded under the Pretenders name in six years.
It seems a bit silly to refer to the Pretenders - the band at this point is Chrissie Hynde and whomever she elects to play alongside. On “Break Up the Concrete,” Miss Hynde works with a slate of mostly obscure backing players, some of whom come with impressive alt-country pedigrees, and there is a bit of that vibe. However, the musical roots here are older than the alt-country movement of the 1990s. There are shades of Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison, synthesized with freewheeling abandon.
The mix of styles betrays a kinship with Bob Dylan’s work on the iconic 1965 album “Highway 61 Revisited.” The connection is more than speculative. The first track’s title, “Boots of Chinese Plastic,” is a clear allusion to Bob Dylan’s “Boots of Spanish Leather.”
More than that, the opening rhythm-guitar riff is an explosive version of “Tombstone Blues,” and the imagistic, rapid-fire lyrics and twangy guitar fills make the comparison inevitable. There’s a literal connection as well - drummer Jim Keltner, a much admired 66-year-old session man, was an occasional Dylan band mate.
“Love’s a Mystery” is an unabashedly twangy song, driven by the excellent pedal steel work of guitarist Eric Heywood. Mr. Heywood uses the pedal steel like an organ to create sonic arcs that glide above and below the melody line. Miss Hynde’s lyrics, delivered in a casual, almost breezy style, betray a gentle, resigned nostalgia. She sings, “Lovers of today/ Aren’t like lovers of the past/ They used to find a way/ To get a love affair to last.”
Miss Hynde’s vocal style seems almost unchanged, although when she was young, her voice was possessed of a preternatural maturity - so it might be more reasonable to say that at 57, she’s growing into her voice.
“Rosalee,” a slow, grinding 12-bar blues, showcases guitarist James Walbourne. He manages to capture something of the jangled spirit of Pretenders founding guitarist James Honeyman-Scott with tightly wound, compact licks that sound like a chain-saw engine turning over.
The title track takes Bo Diddley’s signature rhythm as its point of departure for a kind of talking blues. The slow, languorous “The Nothing Maker” is the album’s lyrical standout, an easygoing, deceptively cynical soft-rock song that features Miss Hynde singing over an acoustic guitar. She sings, “The succeeder justifies/ Why he needs more than the rest/ And believes his own lies/ And thinks he’s the best.”
Though “Break Up the Concrete” doesn’t ring out with the astonishing new-wave originality of the early Pretenders, it’s almost compulsively listenable. I’m hard-pressed to think of a better, more durable, more cohesive new album I’ve heard this year.
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