More of the Music of The Pretenders
- Seriously good sound throughout this vintage copy (the first to hit the site in over three years), with both sides earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades or BETTER
- The right original British pressings are an audiophile dream when they have this kind of punchy bass and pile-driving energy
- Bill Price engineered and Chris Thomas produced, brilliantly of course – you know them from the Sex Pistols’ debut and The Clash’s London Calling
- 4 stars: “What’s more the unique American voice of Hynde matched with the tribal beat of Martin Chambers and spangly guitar of Honeyman-Scott was as close to perfect as a band could get in the late 70s.”
- If you’re a fan of these hard-rockin’ Brits (with an American frontwoman), this classic from 1981 surely belongs in your collection.
- The complete list of titles from 1981 that we’ve reviewed to date can be found here.
If any of this commentary looks familiar there’s a simple explanation for that fact; it’s lifted practically wholesale from our listings for the first Pretenders album.
The two albums are twins, with the same engineer, the same producer, even the same band members, something that was regrettably and tragically to change soon enough.
What the Best Sides of Pretenders II Have to Offer Is Not Hard to Hear
- The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
- The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes even as late as 1981
- Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
- Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
- Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space
No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.
What We’re Listening For on Pretenders II
- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
- The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
- Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
- Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
- Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
- Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
Tubey Magic Is Key
This original British pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records cannot even BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.
If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.
Forget the dubby domestic vinyl (or German or Japanese), these Brit pressings are the only way to go.
And this one is quieter than most. Many of the copies I bought from English record dealers were just BEAT. They kept telling me they played fine (on their Technics tables I’m guessing) but I could not for the life of me replicate their findings for myself here in the states.
This is one of the few that has survived the enthusiasms of the early ’80s and can still be played on audiophile equipment in 2017. That makes it a rare copy indeed.
And it sounds terrific.
Price and Thomas
Bill Price engineered and Chris Thomas produced. You may remember them from the Sex Pistols’ debut and The Clash’s London Calling, two amazingly well-recorded albums. Wish we could find them; as I said, dealing with English record sellers is more often than not an unpleasant, frustrating, not to say expensive, experience I would not wish on anyone.
Side One
The Adultress
Bad Boys Get Spanked
Message Of Love
I Go To Sleep
Birds Of Paradise
Talk Of The Town
Side Two
Waste Not Want Not
Day After Day
Jealous Dogs
The English Roses
Louie Louie
AMG 4 Star Review
Yes, it’s a little slicker and more stylized than its predecessor, and, yes, there’s a little bit of filler, yet any album where rockers as tough as “Message of Love” and “The Adultress” are balanced by a pop tune as lovely as “Talk of the Town” is hard to resist.
And when you realize that this fantastic band only recorded two albums, you take that second album, warts and all, because the teaming of Hynde and Honeyman-Scott was one of the great pairs, and it’s utterly thrilling to hear them together, even when the material isn’t quite up to the high standards they set the first time around.