• POP/ROCK

THE PRETENDERS

Break Up the Concrete

Shangri-La Music

* ½

Pretenders fans with high expectations for the group's first studio album in six years will be sorely disappointed: Break Up the Concrete is nothing more than singer Chrissie Hynde sowing her rockabilly oats at age 57.

There's no hint of the songwriting mastery of Pretenders standards such as Brass in Pocket, Talk of the Town, Don't Get Me Wrong, Message of Love or My City Was Gone. Instead, we get stripped-down garage guitars, watered-down punk attitude and plenty of predictable chord progressions.

Could Hynde's choice of drummer Jim Keltner over Pretenders mainstay Martin Chambers have influenced the album's direction? After all, Keltner made his name partly from his session work on solo recordings by George Harrison, John Lennon and Ringo Starr.

On The Nothing Maker, Hynde's limp, acoustic-Americana take on The Beatles' Nowhere Man, she purrs nasally overtop a weepy steel guitar: ''He makes nothing/He's a nothing maker/He's the maker of nothing/He's the nothing-maker.'' And the slow, whiskey-bar blues number Don't Lose Faith in Me blends a typically derivative Lenny Kravitz chord progression with the raw, sloppy power of the Fab Four's Yer Blues.

Hynde is clearly having fun -- and trying. But her energetic, staccato vocals are unable to lift either the title track or Don't Cut Your Hair above empty rockabilly.

Elsewhere, Break Up the Concrete is full of country-tearjerker hope and regret, from the sweet, R.E.M.-style midtempo ballad Love's a Mystery (''but I'd do it again'') to the meandering The Last Ride (''I made my bed, but I couldn't sleep in it'') to the melancholy thank-you note of You Didn't Have To.

But the album suffers from a lack of humor, insight and melodic heft.

Pod Picks:Love's a Mystery, You Didn't Have To.

-- MICHAEL HAMERSLY

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