The Pretenders @ The Electric Factory

The Pretenders
@ The Electric Factory
2/6/09
www.thepretenders.com

With The Pretenders playing Philadelphia’s Electric Factory on a Friday night, PA/NJ babysitters were in high demand on February 6th. However, with the band's latest release, Break Up the Concrete, picking up right where “The Adultress” left off, and a tour that’s an affront to the very white heteronormative suburbanism that afforded them their legacy, The Pretenders are embodying the term “badass” more fully than they have in the past two decades. And Chrissie Hynde? At 57 years-old, in skintight jeans and knee-high vinyl boots, she looked… well, still pretty damn sexy. In a nearly two-hour set revolving around themes such as S&M, genderfucking, and The Kinks, The Pretenders seemed to strip themselves of all previous ties to honky reggae, Demi Moore movies, and Lilith Fair.

Chrissie’s new live band, featuring original Pretender Martin Chambers, along with a group of young punks, gave the band’s catalogue just the audacity that had been absent on recent tours. Hynde strutted across the stage with more credible sass than any other surviving Post-Punk diva, coyly mocking those audience members shouting for songs like “Night in My Veins.” The Pretenders were out to prove that they weren't just a nostalgia band.

The band was anxious to present their latest release in a live setting, featuring their most brashly danceable songs since Learning to Crawl and the grainiest ballads Hynde has ever produced. The former of which tended to be more impressive in that particular setting (that is, a 3,000-capacity room that looks like a “futuristic” set of a 1950s B-movie, filled with people who’s last concert attended was on Journey’s summer jaunt): the reckless mod-abilly of “Boots Of Chinese Plastic” opened the evening with an almost violent rapture thought to be relegated to bands still promoting their first album, followed by “Don’t Cut Your Hair,” a could-be sequel to “Precious” that is just as fantastically juvenile as one would imagine, and the playfully primal pop of the title track that closed the set to more ass-shaking than you would expect for a song likely only 5% of the audience knew. Unfortunately, the alt. country balladry of “The Nothing Maker” and “Love’s a Mystery” were lost among the sound of hundreds of weekend warriors struggling to order $7 Budweiser’s.

Highlighting The Pretenders’ Philadelphia set were songs like “Tattooed Love Boys,” “Thumbelina,” and “The Wait,” from the days when the band still had a bit of the 100 Club in them. The set did, however, include a handful of dentist-office FM favorites, such as “Brass in Pocket” and “Back on the Chain Gang,” but the band managed to avoid “Middle of the Road” and Chrissie spruced up “Message of Love” into one of the night’s high points, with the line “Oh, it’s good, good, good, Like… Morrissey.” Of course, in 2009 the Pretenders aren’t exactly a punk band, or anything too likely to offend, but it’s pretty cool to find old-timers putting up such a convincing fight. Izzy Cihak