This came out in 2002 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Chrissie Hynde stopped pretending she cares about her career years ago.
Nowadays, you get the sense the veteran singer-songwriter makes music only to please one person — herself. So Loose Screw, her eighth studio effort and the third disc from her latest version of The Pretenders, isn’t remarkably different from her last few releases. You get a couple of spiky pop-rockers like Lie To Me and Fools Must Die; a handful of smoky skank-pop ditties like Time and Complex Person; a couple of slinky slow-groovers like Kinda Nice, I Like It and Walk Like A Panther; the odd heartbreak ballad like The Losing to showcase her continually spine-tingling vocals; and — perhaps most importantly — a couple of inclusions of the F-word, which Hynde still wields better than any other woman in rock. All in all, Loose Screw is a long way from Precious, but I’d be pretending if I said I wasn’t glad to keep hearing from Hynde every now and then.
