When a band names their album “Relentless”, the last thing one would expect to be is bored. Sadly, however, the latest album by renowned 80’s rock group The Pretenders defies expectations by containing some of the blandest rock music I’ve heard in a long time.
The album starts inoffensively enough with “Losing My Sense of Taste”, a somewhat grungy number containing a pair of rather decent guitar solos. The vocals sound somewhat flat, but that’s to be somewhat expected considering lead singer Chrisse Hynde turned 72 last month. In any case, the second track, “A Love” is a noticeable improvement, with Hynde’s vocals fitting better with the Smiths-esque instrumentation.
The song “Domestic Silence”, while featuring a pretty good riff, also features lyrics that are far less clever than they think they are (“Domestic silence comes in many places”) and a guitar solo so tepid and underwhelming I would have preferred if they hadn’t even bothered. “The Copa” is where the album really starts to drag, combining yawn-inducing adult contemporary musicianship with flowery, melodramatic lyrics (“You're long blond in hair of heavy salty sea / A curtain when it closed over and above me.”).
Writing-wise, “The Promise of Love” is an improvement over the previous track, but is let down by a glaring distortion during the choruses which I highly doubt to be intentional. Thankfully, the next track, “Merry Widow” is actually rather decent, being a psychedelic rock track with a sound similar to something The Doors would’ve put out, especially during the coda. There are some production-related gripes that I have with the song (The drums sound rather flat, and there is some slight audio clipping), but they’re nowhere near as bad as they were in the previous song.
“Let The Sun Come In” is another success as far as I’m concerned, boasting a nice, thick-sounding bassline and the best chorus on the whole album. Unfortunately, the album dives right back into mediocrity with “Look Away”, another dull piece of fodder for coffee shop playlists that sounds as if it were written to be sung by someone a few decades younger. The next two tracks, “Your House is On Fire” and “Just Let It Go”, continue this trend, but come off as being slightly more interesting due to trip-hop-inspired production and a well-executed guitar solo by James Walbourne respectively.
11 tracks into this 12-track long album, “Vainglorious” finally delivers the high-energy rock sound that one would expect from the album when looking at the title and cover. That’s not the say that the song is very good, mind you, as it features one of the lousiest excuses for a chorus I’ve heard in a good while. Luckily, it seems that The Pretenders believe in saving the best for last, as “I Think About You Daily” is miles above everything that came before it. The combination of Chrisse Hynde’s delicate vocals and a dizzyingly gorgeous string section conducted by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood fit perfectly for the song, an ode to a lost love. One can only imagine what this album would’ve been like had they put this much effort into the other songs.
Similar to Throbbing Gristle’s “20 Jazz Funk Greats”, the title of this album comes off as a cruel joke, with the key difference that one album is a seminal, genre-defining work, while the other comes off for the most part like a band going through the motions in order to keep the lights on. Even the cover seems like something that was thrown together in two hours at most. In the end, with the exception of the excellent closer, this is an album so mediocre that I can’t even bother getting upset at it, since I’ll probably have forgotten everything about it within a week.
5/10