My Girl (1991)

Sometimes it seems like the Smithereens' entire career was mistimed. After the relative success of 11, Pat DiNizio and company returned with their most straightforward and mainstream-ready release yet in Blow Up. Produced by Ed Stasium, the mix is arena ready and clean, and DiNizio co-wrote two of the disc's most accessible songs with songwriters Diane Warren and Julian Lennon…

Many of the songs on Strange Days had been written around the same time as the ones that appeared on The Doors, and with hindsight one has the sense that the best of the batch had already been cherry picked for the debut album. For that reason, the band's second effort isn't as consistently stunning as their debut, though overall it's a very successful continuation of the themes of their classic album. Besides the hit "Strange Days," highlights included the funky "Moonlight Drive," the eerie "You're Lost Little Girl," and the jerkily rhythmic "Love Me Two Times," which gave the band a small chart single. "My Eyes Have Seen You" and "I Can't See Your Face in My Mind" are minor but pleasing entries in the group's repertoire that share a subdued Eastern psychedelic air. The 11-minute "When the Music's Over" would often be featured as a live showstopper, yet it also illustrated their tendency to occasionally slip into drawn-out bombast.

This is Polish trumpeter and composer Tomasz Stanko at his most confounding. Paired with Janisz Skowron on synthesizer, Stanko claims that these pieces are nothing more than short little musical stories - not fully realized compositions, but sketches. That's reasonable enough, but when certain pieces - such as the opener - are nine minutes in length, that becomes somewhat tenuous as an explanation. The 12 pieces that make up this "suite," if indeed it can be called that, are ephemeral roots and seedlings of ideas not yet realized and not meant to be. This, too, is acceptable as a notion, but why record them? Perhaps Brian Eno can get away with nonsense like this since he's not - by his own admission - a musician, but Stanko is an ambitious talent, a sophisticated composer whose control over an ensemble brings out the sublime in them.

Off the Wall was a massive success, spawning four Top Ten hits (two of them number ones), but nothing could have prepared Michael Jackson for Thriller. Nobody could have prepared anybody for the success of Thriller, since the magnitude of its success was simply unimaginable – an album that sold 40 million copies in its initial chart run, with seven of its nine tracks reaching the Top Ten (for the record, the terrific "Baby Be Mine" and the pretty good ballad "The Lady in My Life" are not like the others). This was a record that had something for everybody, building on the basic blueprint of Off the Wall by adding harder funk, hard rock, softer ballads, and smoother soul – expanding the approach to have something for every audience.