New Albums from Aging Rockers: The Curmudgeon on The Pretenders, Graham Parker and Barenaked Ladies

The first song on the Pretenders’ new Relentless album is “Losing My Sense of Taste.” The title comes from the Covid symptom, but the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde flips its meaning from one’s taste for food to one’s taste in music and art. “I don’t even care about rock ‘n’ roll,” she sings in a panic, or “Beardsley, Rothko.”

Any music fan who’s crossed the boundary of 40 has felt a similar anxiety. The heroes of one’s youth have either disappeared or have released one mediocre album after another. One confronts the terrible choice of abandoning those old favorites or succumbing to nostalgia.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The Pretenders, who released their terrific eponymous debut album in 1979, and their best album, Learning To Crawl, in 1984, are still making impressive new music. Relentless may not be a pinnacle project, but it’s ambitiously risk-taking and solidly executed.

Though that lead-off track has the grinding guitars to justify the album’s title, the rest of the album is surprisingly varied—from the acoustic-guitar folk-rock of “Look Away” to the Stonesy rocker “Vainglorious,” from the psychedelia of “Let the Sun Come In” to the sumptuous balladry of “I Think About You Daily,” featuring a lovely string arrangement by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood.

All 11 songs were co-written by Hynde and guitarist James Walbourne, and Hynde’s lyrics are usually the best thing about these new numbers. Most of them wrestle with the dilemma of continually craving romance even in the face of a long history of failures. On “A Love,” she’s terrified of what a new infatuation may be getting her into. On “Domestic Silence,” she wonders why she’s still in a relationship where they’ve stopped talking.

On “The Copa,” an idyllic seaside affair is ended by her need to get back to work. “I Think About You Daily” is a sad apology to a lover discarded when her career was hottest. These situations have no easy answers, and Hynde doesn’t offer any, but she gets to the heart of the matter as few songwriters do.

Graham Parker had his own terrific debut with Howlin’ Wind in 1976 and his best album, Squeezing Out Sparks in 1979. Yet he too has released a solid new album this year. Last Chance To Learn the Twist reunites the singer from London’s Hackney neighborhood with his longtime guitarist, the Rumour’s Martin Belmont. The sound is vintage pub-rock, which in the late-‘70s mixed hard, fast punk-rock with reggae, soul and pre-Beatles rock ‘n’ roll.

Parker is as much a master of this genre now as he was when he rivaled Elvis Costello for first in the field. These 13 new originals once again marry his cantankerous skepticism about the human condition with catchy hooks and compact, pugnacious rhythm tracks. Old age has only made him crankier than ever, whether he’s complaining about the destruction of the planet, homeless in the rain and relationships that went bust.

As always, he redeems this approach by aiming the sharpest barbs at the mirror. Who’s responsible for many of these problems? People like him, who didn’t open the door to strangers, who didn’t stay in touch with a lover and who didn’t take political action. “We Did Nothing,” he laments on the moody rocker of the same name.

On “Last Stretch of the Road,” a harmonica-fueled folk-rocker about getting old, he asks, “Why didn’t I detox? Why did I wear those sandals with socks?” But he’s also capable of being serious on gorgeous soul ballads such as “It Mattered to Me” and “Lost Track of Time,” where he admits just how deeply his failures cut.

Watch Graham Parker perform at the Paste Studio in New York in 2019:

It’s been 25 years since Canada’s Barenaked Ladies topped the American pop charts with their 1998 single, “One Week.” They never had another top-10 single, but they had six top-25 albums in all, including two after their primary singer-songwriter, Steven Page, left the group in 2009. With or without Page, these Canadians were so skilled at crafting pop-hook choruses and buoyant vocal harmonies that it almost didn’t matter that they lacked the emotional heft or edgy attitude of a Hynde or Parker.

The band’s new album, In Flight, offers more of the same, even offering an infectious tune, “One Night,” that inevitably echoes their biggest hit. Three of the original members are still on board, and Kevin Hearn has been a member since 1995. This quartet knows how to create an earworm chorus and how to polish that until it shines. That’s too rare a talent to be easily dismissed. The lyrics mostly poke gentle fun at themselves for getting old, but this kind of easy-to-digest radio music never goes out of style.

Far more ambitious is Martin Zellar’s Head West. Zellar made his first single with Minnesota’s alt-country band, the Gear Daddies, in 1984; their best known song, “Zamboni,” was released in 1990. Zellar’s new solo album, his first collection of new songs in 11 years, may well be the best work of his career. As always, these new songs generate their heat by rubbing his deadpan voice against chiming guitar figures, as if the doubts of the former were a brake against the rising hopes of the latter.

This new record is full of road songs—literal evocations of cross-country trips as well as metaphoric meditations on the deaths and divorces that mark life’s mileage. “Texas Just Won’t End,” “Anyone but Me” and the title track capture the way landscape, music and gasoline mark a young Midwesterner’s hopeful pilgrimage to California. “We Ran Wild,” “Boats Slowly Sinking” and “Goodbye Bill” pay tribute to old colleagues who became rock ‘n’ roll casualties.

Most heartbreaking of all is “Better Off Apart,” a scene from an amicable but painful divorce, done as a duet with Presley Haile. This melancholy material is always salvaged by the lilting lyricism of the guitars (played by the singer’s son Wilson and/or former Gear Daddies bandmate Randy Broughten) and the light-footed rhythmic momentum.