After a spontaneous teaming on a satisfying first album, Sittin' In, Loggins and Messina quickly turned themselves into a precision-tuned but insipid aggregation with as unerring an instinct for spineless FM pop as Seals & Crofts or Don McLean. By their third album, Full Sail, it was a tossup as to which had become harder to take: Kenny Loggins's corniness or Jim Messina's machinelike aloofness.

But on Mother Lode, unexpectedly, the taste and imaginativeness that marked that first album have been partially restored. While it's true that neither Loggins nor Messina has yet managed to express himself in song or singing with any sizable intensity, the two here at least have the sense to stay unobtrusively melodic through their up-front segments. These actually just serve as interludes joining the pieces of what is clearly this album's meat: the instrumental music of an engagingly sophisticated band. A Messina tune with the dubious-sounding title of "Be Free" contains the record's most exciting section, a vibrant, cascading passage—built around Messina's insinuating bouzouki-like mandolin work—that's a good deal more eloquent than the sum total of the platitudes that litter the lyrics of both writers.

The reeds of Al Garth and Jon Clarke stand out dramatically now that they've been freed from the formulated texturizing of earlier L&M albums. In general, the group seems to have been inspired by the daring of another successful L.A.-based radio band, Steely Dan—realizing at last, perhaps, that you don't have to be simplistic to sell records. (RS 179)

BUD SCOPPA