With the unlikely moniker of Bread, sans hip status, scorned by Underground FM DJs, they retain an unusual and rather phenomenal popularity. You might call them innocuous. They sound a little bit like the latter Beatles at their most saccharine, a bit like the insipid heart of CSN&Y, and a lot like a perfect radio distillation of the last year's most sentimentally pseudo-personal balladic trends, Love Story making headway in the wake of used-up styles once called folk-rock and hooking a thoroughly ambivalent audience. And in that crassly calculating process they manage to be thoroughly appealing.

"Make It With You" fairly monopolized the airwaves last summer. It was so limp that it made the White Plains "My Baby Loves Lovin'" sound gutsy, but it's always nice to have one wistful ballad on the band, and you vacillated between irritation and tolerating it and even liking its tissue of contrivances in the same way that every hit the Carpenters have had has intruded itself on your tastes. It was nice, which was more than you could say for astringent terrors like "Hand-Me-Down World." And the second album hit the same way, so damn pleasant you found yourself putting it on for sheer respite from all the strained quasi-Creedences.

The new one offers no surprises. One nice thing about Bread is that they're totally professional, and as Mellow as most of the music is these days, they never cop out to sheer sloppiness; every riff is precisely enunciated and the drummer never drops a beat. Maybe that's what's wrong with them, they just might be too perfect to live, but that's a matter of taste, and who knows what we'll be listening to tomorrow anyway? They've got standards and they sing with feeling, and maybe that's enough right now.

Manna has a heavier schmaltz quotient than their other two, but then On the Waters drew more from Tin Pan Alley than their first one. And then again, schmaltz has more branches then meet the eye. Burt Bacharach is schmaltz aplenty, but so is Elton John, and even if "If" sports lines like "If a picture paints a thousand words/Then why can't I paint you?"; the tale of woe called "Come Again" works its way to "Time–the friend that would bring him around,/Is turning on you and it's bringing you down."

Admittedly that's out of context, and even out of context it seems to bear a certain authenticity, but who needs lyrics like that no matter how genuine? Do we really need for rock 'n' roll to explicate epistemological dilemmas and the traumas of our love lives? Will Bread or their brethren patch rended romances with the universality of their supra-sincere stanzas? Tune in next album, if you really need it, and see what this human drama can do for you and yours.

Not everything they do smacks of soap, though. "Let Your Love Go" and "Be Kind To Me" are effective injunctions to rock 'n' roll women to come across, even if they do lack the visceral urgency of the real thing. After all, this is about as insistent as Bread gets. And the clever Elton John-Dory Previn Hollywood moonings of "Come Again" bridge into the worthy lope of "Truckin'," which not only kicks the ass of the Grateful Dead song by the same name but is one of the very few second generation "truckdriver" highway songs that doesn't echo "Six Days on the Road." It's not gonna surprise you, but it delivers with a rare consistency, which is about the nicest thing you can say about Bread. It's hard to imagine going out of your way for them, but they're nice to have around. (RS 82)

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