Chrissie Hynde: All Work and All Play : Pop music review: Driven by her music, the longtime rock star sends the message that doing the business of playing in a band is its own greatest reward. The result is a dynamic contrast between taut and dreamy material at the House of Blues.

Chrissie Hynde has been creating distinctive music for the Pretenders for 15 years, but the most endearing thing about her performance at the House of Blues on Sunday was her attitude.

Everything about the show conveyed an unspoken but unmistakable belief in rock’s potential to be a transforming force and a necessity of life. Her focus and ferocity insisted that just doing the business of playing in a band is its own greatest reward.

Under those terms the inconsistency of Hynde’s career seems less a matter of miscalculation or the tragic accidents that hit the Pretenders early on than a product of very different priorities--ones you rarely encounter in a rock world full of ambitious clawing for position.

Like her vision of rock’s essential role, Hynde’s music reflects her upbringing in the Midwest in the ‘60s and ‘70s, a setting where she embraced everything from the Motown and Merseybeat of pop radio to the heartland grunt-rock of a Grand Funk Railroad to the underground forces that expanded the music’s expressive horizons.

So while she’s a sucker for a frat-house, beer-bust riff, she’s too much the craftswoman to leave it just a dumb riff. She shakes things up with rhythmic invention (the return of original drummer Martin Chambers made this jumpy, driving side of the band especially potent Sunday) and the melodic flair of a pop classicist.

The House of Blues show--part of a U.S. tour of club dates that also scheduled a Roxy concert on Monday--was propelled by the dynamic contrast between the taut, tough, metallic tunes and the expansive, dreamy, pop-leaning material.

Hynde, 42, was in great voice, her melismatic croon sounding radiant on the flowing pop songs, her tart accusations full of fire and bravado.

*

Without laboring to sell the band’s new album, Hynde and her new lineup integrated four of its songs into a set that compiled music from nearly all Pretenders periods. The ease with which the new tunes--especially the sultry “Hollywood Perfume”--fit in reflected both Hynde’s renewed inspiration and her new music’s absence of major advances.

Hynde seemed to be having a great time, charged by the close quarters and intimate interplay with the audience. Playfully coming on as the tough chick, she was part Shangri-La and part Supreme, a bit of Patti Smith and a female Ramone.

She struck her stances with a timeless rock grandeur made effective by her total involvement and lack of self-consciousness.

The latest edition of the Pretenders--Hynde, Chambers, guitarist Adam Seymour and bassist Andy Hobson (with a supplemental keyboardist, Zeb Jameson)--still seems to be coming together, playing solidly enough to create plenty of sparks but not quite finding the interplay or force to make it transcendent.