Packed : Pretenders : Review : Rolling Stone

Recently, Chrissie Hynde has dismissed queries about working on her own, claiming she likes being part of a band. For all the shake-ups down Pretenders way – more than ten years of them – her music has followed a sure trajectory. The Pretenders sound like they do, supremely melodic and rife with sudden nerve-racking downshifts, album in and album out. Whatever the motif, the songs are carried along, Johnny Marr's guitar notwithstanding, on Hynde's assured tremolo and what must be the throatiest nasal voice in rock.

So here's Packed!, as in "Let's Make a Pact" – a deal of a lifetime that Hynde offers with her usual directness and sentiment. Hynde isn't "graying" or "mellowing" – that dinosaur is hauled out every time she does something normal, like get married or have a baby or stop wearing leather pants. You'd have to have slept through Learning to Crawl to think Packed! is uncharacteristic. While she asks for a "Sense of Purpose" and swoops silkily through "How Do I Miss You," poignancy isn't Hynde's thing. Her rock bones are still shaking. "Downtown (Akron)" is this year's "Tattooed Love Boys"; fast, strident, unintelligible. "Millionaires" takes (misdirected) swipes at the guys in the title, the ones with more money than "us." (What do you mean "us," kemo sabe?)

Hynde shouts, "Hold a candle to this!" on one track, but not many can. Packed! is the singer all over – poetic and contradictory, as bitchy and mushy as a person can get within eleven songs.