The Pretenders - Learning to Crawl [Mfsl 2012] (1984) mp3@320 {1337x}-kawli

Chrissie Hynde took a long, hard road to rock & roll stardom, but when her band, the Pretenders, finally broke through in 1979, they wasted no time, growing from promising newcomers on the British music scene to major international stardom with a pair of smash albums to their credit in a mere three years. But the Pretenders’ meteoric rise came to a crashing halt in 1982, when drug abuse claimed the life of guitarist James Honeyman-Scott and forced Hynde and drummer Martin Chambers to dump bassist Pete Farndon, who would also succumb to an OD in April 1983.

Hynde was forced by circumstance to reinvent the Pretenders for their third album, 1984′s Learning to Crawl, but if the new edition of the group lacked some of the spark of the band that made the first two LPs, through sheer force of will Hynde created a masterpiece. While Hynde hardly held back in her emotionally potent songwriting in the Pretenders’ early work, on Learning to Crawl there’s a gravity to her lyrics that blended with her tough but wiry melodic sense and streetwise intelligence to create a set of truly remarkable tunes.

Three albums into her recording career, Chrissie Hynde found herself having to put the past to bed and carve out a new beginning for herself with Learning to Crawl, but she pulled it off with a striking mixture of courage, strength, and great rock & roll; with the exception of the instant-classic debut album, it’s the Pretenders’ finest work.

Tracklist:
01. Middle of the Road
02. Back on the Chain Gang
03. Time the Avenger
04. Watching the Clothes
05. Show Me
06. Thumbelina
07. My City Was Gone
08. Thin Line Between Love and Hate
09. I Hurt You
10. 2000 Miles

Mastered at Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab, Sebastopol, CA.
Source: SACD (MFSL 2012) converted to mp3 with dBpoweramp

Media Info:
Bitrate: 320 kbps
Channels: joint stereo
Samplerate: 44100
Encoder: LAME 3.99
MPEG-1 layer 3



*many thanks and much respect to hdmusic for the source, and all those who care enough to share