The difference in quality between AWB's excellent first Atlantic album, which boasted almost uniformly strong tunes, and the slick filler that passes for songs on Cut the Cake, their last record, and Soul Searching, their new one, is dismaying. Like Cut the Cake, Soul Searching is competently arranged and aurally polished, thanks to producer Arif Mardin, but it consists almost entirely of arrangements in search of themes. Although the formula has been disguised by the overlay of concept, complete with "Overture," Soul Searching numbingly repeats variations of instrumental riffs that on Average White Band sounded inventive and terse. "Love Your Life," "Goin' Home" and "I'm the One," all descended from "Pick Up the Pieces"—via the placement of repeated jazzy sax phrases above a hypnotic twang-funk rhythm—sound sluggish and unstructured in comparison to the prototype. "Soul Searching" and "Everybody's Darling" play with a modified big-band sound harmonically reminiscent of Chicago's, but much less kinetic. Both songs suggest that AWB would do well to exclude brass from their albums and stick solely with reeds.

The only strong cut is an uplifting disco production, "Queen of My Soul," which gracefully interlaces Latin and be-bop influences into a full, late-Motown sound. This is clearly the direction AWB should pursue, not the least reason being the chance it offers for Hamish Stuart and Alan Gorrie to act as lead singers rather than waste their talents supplying vocal texture.

Wild Cherry, a four-man band from Steubenville, Ohio, who have a big hit with "Play That Funky Music," specialize in crude electric funk derived from early Sly and the Family Stone. Though black groups like Parliament work the same turf in a manner at once more sophisticated and more ominous, Wild Cherry's dance music is at least raucously catchy in its parody of lewdness. But other kinds of material, including an inept version of Holland-Dozier-Holland's "Nowhere to Run," show how locked into a single gimmick they are. What is perplexing about Wild Cherry is the extent to which they treat their "funkiness" as a gimmick and a joke. Often, Robert Parissi's soul singing lapses into broad stylistic caricature. One might easily assume the whole Wild Cherry concept to be a racial joke in especially poor taste. The notion that any average white band can play soul is as condescendingly silly as the popular myth that anyone can sing country (see Nashville). For all their lazy recycling, AWB is at least secure in their aural sophistication and slick musicianship. (RS 221)

STEPHEN HOLDEN