Bread - The Best of Bread

Genres: Soft Rock Contemporary Pop/Rock AM Pop

Release Date: 2001

Review: Bread has a general image (for those even familiar with them) of being a "soft rock" band. While it is true that the band made plenty of great ballads, this collection includes at least one tune to break that mold, hard rocker "Mother Freedom". For the most part, though, it has to be admitted that the group was mostly a singles act, so it becomes a game of "Which single CD collection has the best tunes?"

CONS:
With this one, you sacrifice "Fancy Dancer" (a nicely chuggin' midtempo rocker..they didn't a lot of good rockier stuff, but this is one of them...) and "London Bridge"..which is kind of slight lyrically, but so darn melodic you can't help but find it charming anyhow. (From "Anthology")

PROS:
The tradeoff is you get "Mother Freedom" (their hardest rock number) and "Daughter", a nice cautionary tale from David Gates, warning his offspring not to settle for less than the best.

BOTTOM LINE:
Despite really loving "Mother Freedom" and "Daughter", I feel that "Anthology" is the best single disc collection of Bread. If you have more money to spend, then plunk it down and get the excellent Rhino 2CD "Retrospective" which will let you have your cake and eat it,too, along with adding some excellent David Gates and James Griffin solo material and a couple other decent album tracks that didn't make the cut for this one or for "Anthology".