Bread: The Best of Bread Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		0.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.5

Bread: The Best of Bread Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 3, 2025

Note: For the ninth grouped assortment of Quadio Blu-ray releases, Rhino is doing something a bit unusual, offering Greatest Hits (or something similar) albums from the New Seekers, Bread, Carly Simon and Judy Collins.

Something kind of interesting happened in mainstream radio as the sixties gave way to the seventies. From at least the mid-sixties on for the next four to five years, American airwaves were full of increasingly eclectic, sometimes even bizarre, offerings that were often intentionally boisterous and at least subliminally provocative. But suddenly as the summer of 1970 started to unfold, two arguably "retro" sounding groups suddenly were vying for the top spot on the singles chart. (The) Carpenters of course entered the lexicon of easy listening classics with (They Long to Be) Close to You, and about a month after that song topped the charts, Bread usurped it from them with Make It With You, and suddenly good, old fashioned melodic pop was back in fashion. Carpenters tended to work in a quasi-close harmony format that at least suggested the iconic vocal arrangers of yore like Gene Puerling, if often in a decidedly more pop framework than Puerling's jazz classics, but Bread was almost more of a singer-songwriter assemblage focused pretty heavily on frontman David Gates.

The album's track list can be seen in the screenshots of the disc menu I've uploaded to accompany this review.

Bread: The Best of Bread Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

As alluded to above, this disc features a static menu. In the "continuing adventures" (?) of Rhino's variant authoring of these discs, this is one where the audio button does nothing and you have to navigate through the track list to change the audio codec. The song starts over if the codec is changed. Screenshots 9 and 10 show how the color of the track changes if you scroll through the list before choosing something.

Bread: The Best of Bread Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Best of Bread features DTS-HD Master Audio 4.0 and DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 options. Bread kind of broke the mold and/or the Dutch Oven by really not emphasizing hugely layered backups in their material, tending to favor David Gates' beautifully languid voice in the majority of their big hit tracks. Vocals are excellently prioritized here, but it's really the glimmering instrumental and orchestral accompaniment where the four channel presentation can really show off its most impressive activity. Various songs can anchor guitars either in the front or rear, with drums and bass "mirroring" them (i.e., if the guitars in the rear, other instruments tend to be forward, and vice versa). There's a really gorgeous fluidity to things which, yes, is almost relentlessly mellow, but which offers sterling fidelity and crystal clear reproduction. Somewhat as with Carly Simon: The Best of Carly Simon, which repeated tracks from the previously released Quadio version of Carly Simon: No Secrets, this album repeats some tracks off of Rhino's previously released Quadio version of Bread: Baby I'm-A Want You

Bread: The Best of Bread Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

There are no on disc supplements like bonus tracks. The insert booklet reproduces some of the album art along with the Quadio standard picture of a master tape and the usual "bass management" verbiage on the back cover. The disc is labelled like the vintage Elektra album with a butterfly logo.

Bread: The Best of Bread Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I mentioned in our Bread: Baby I'm-A Want You Blu-ray review how kind of hilariously a high school English teacher of mine was David Gates' cousin, and we found out that little tidbit on the same day "our" Mr. Gates announced his engagement, and not one friggin' student asked poor Mr. Gates about his potential new bride, choosing instead to pester him about what David was "really" like. That may indicate the impact that Bread had back in the day, and this collection certainly provides ample proof that it was well warranted. Highly recommended.