Published on Jan 2, 2006
[Adapted from a review that first appeared in
On The Town magazine 5/28/96]
So what do you do when, three years down the road
from your massively successful debut album, half your band OD’s at
the same time you’re becoming a single mother? If you’re a
singer-songwriter with the guts and talent of Chrissie Hynde, you
go out and author the best album of your career.
The Pretenders’ first two albums had already had an
almost revolutionary impact on the early ’80s music scene, grafting
of the furious energy of late ’70s punk and new wave onto the
cerebral guitar-rock of bands like the Kinks and projecting it
through the sensuous tough-girl persona of bandleader Hynde. Then
disaster struck: first bassist Pete Farndon was booted from the
band when he became too strung out too perform; then guitarist
James Honeyman-Scott, co-architect with Hynde of the band’s to-then
unique sound, died suddenly from a drug overdose. Within a year,
Farndon was dead as well. Meanwhile, Hynde had conceived a child
with Kinks leader Ray Davies and gave birth in the midst of the
chaos.
The first sign that these setbacks were less than
permanent ones for the Pretenders came with the release in early
1983 of a single containing two songs which would eventually appear
on Learning To Crawl: “Back on the Chain Gang” and “My City
Was Gone.” These two songs, more melodic than most earlier
Pretenders output and tinged with an aching sense of loss, were
nonetheless also marked by a gritty determination to carry on that
established Hynde’s public persona as much more than just a stage
front, while also solidifying her reputation as a singer-songwriter
of the first order.
The album which followed launches strongly with
“Middle Of The Road,” a driving rocker whose looping central hook
grabs on tight. It’s immediately apparent Hynde’s lyrics have lost
nothing of their pointed strength, and the other remaining original
Pretender, drummer Martin Chambers, pounds his way through like a
man on fire. More hard-edged songs follow — chiefly the
icepick-between-the-ribs kiss-off “Time the Avenger,” the droll
rave-up “Watching The Clothes,” and the dark, tempestuous “I Hurt
You” — but the news was the public blooming of Hynde’s softer
side. On songs like “Back On The Chain Gang,” “Thumbelina” and the
luminous “Show Me,” Hynde lifts quieter emotions from her own
troubled heart and makes them universal, revealing a vulnerability
that rounds out her aforementioned persona without weakening it in
the least.
Learning To Crawl is a testament to
resiliency, and arguably the best album of what remains, more than
two decades years after the rubble of the band’s early catastrophes
settled, a career-in-progress for Chrissie Hynde and her
Pretenders.