This peeks at a great band’s demise. Everything that made them connect is here — the way Jimmy Scott uses phasers and harmonics, the way Chrissie Hynde shows tough love (among other virtues) — but the record is a drag. Bad blood must have drained them. (Half the group was strung out and Hynde was after a married man, Ray Davies of the Kinks.) By the time “Louie Louie” comes, we hear the weight and pain of the album as a tribute to one last get-up. One year later this version of the Pretenders was dead.
Pretenders II
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