Vive El Amori

What a curse it must be to nail it the first time out and then spend the rest of your career trying to get back to that point. Chrissie Hynde laboured long and hard in order to get The Pretenders airborne in 1979, but no sooner had her band become established than the ranks were decimated by Dr. Death. The last two decades have been an epic attempt to replicate the spark of that classic Honeyman-Scott/Farndon line-up.

When, in a recent interview, Hynde ventured that she's only as good as her latest lead guitarist, she simultaneously hit a nerve and did herself a disservice. Of all her post-'83 collaborators, only Johnny Marr could match her swagger, which is not to diss players like Robbie McIntosh, or even her latest foil Adam Seymour, but really, Chrissie's so drop-dead cool, she'll always make her henchmen look dull. Yet here she is, with her best record since Pretenders II.

This new album's triumph is that it manages to mix mainstream tendencies with a bit o' rough. In its opening moments, Hynde is sneering, "They don't make 'em like they used to/You should have just stuck with me" over the blues-harp-enhanced Iggy & The Modern Lovers groove of 'Popstar', and you're thinking, "This is the woman who wrote 'Private Life'." The presence of former New York Doll David Johansen only maximises the effect: she's gone, if not back to the garage, then out of the suburbs and onto main street.

Next up is the Shelly Peiken/Mark McEntee-penned 'Human', the most cockle-warming Pretenders single since 'Hymn To Her' (Chrissie Hynde, aside from being a heart-melting singer and fine songwriter, has always had an uncanny ear for other people's tunes). And on tracks like 'From The Heart Down' and 'Who's Who', beneath Seymour's crackling lead lines, Martin Chambers holds it down with the muscle of a navvy and the precision of a surgeon.

Pretenders records usually come a cropper when the players deviate from the programme, but Hynde's "biker suite", ('Dragway 42', 'Biker' and 'Samurai', a trilogy of songs salvaged from a scrapped concept album) is better than average, by turns broody, moody and tenderloined. However, having had the living shit kicked out of him by road-hogs once, this writer finds the whole motorpsycho-as-the-last-frontiersman shtick a little hard to swallow. But hey, I'm biased.

The standout track though, is undoubtedly 'One More Time', a slow-burning soul ballad that recalls Lorraine Ellison's 'Stay With Me', and features a brazen, hair-raisin' bout of vocal exhibitionism worthy of Otis himself. That the rest of the record can't quite match up to this is no disgrace, although the band try damned hard, particularly on Silvio Rodriguez' 'Rabo De Nube', where Chrissie turns in a grand Spanish torch routine.

In terms of comebacks, Viva El Amor ain't It's Great When You're Straight, but it's a hell of a lot stronger than No Exit. This listener, for one, intends to be down the front when the band hit the Olympia in July.