Thoughts

The Smithereens' excellent sophomore effort picks up where their debut, Especially for You, left off, with Pat DiNizio delivering another impressive batch of superbly constructed pop gems; tracks like "Only a Memory," "House We Used to Live In," and "Drown in My Own Tears" are immediately ingratiating – instantly familiar, yet performed with more than enough energy and flair to sound new and exciting…

Medieval Baebes and other far greater shocks to the bourgeoisie have come along. Wild adventures placed under the rubric of performances of Vivaldi's Four Seasons are commonplace. Yet Nigel Kennedy continues to roost atop the classical sales charts in Europe, and even to command a decent following in the U.S. despite a low American tolerance for British eccentricity. How does he do it? He has kept reinventing himself successfully. Perhaps he's the classical world's version of Madonna: he's possessed of both unerring commercial instincts and with enough of a sense of style to be able to dress them up as forms of rebellion. Inner Thoughts is a collection of slow movements – inner movements of famous concertos from Bach and Vivaldi to Brahms, Bruch, and Elgar.

Between their first album, Revelation, and this follow-up, most of Virus split to form the band Weed. Thoughts, recorded only six months after the debut, shows a radically different group with only two original members. The tracks are much shorter and song-oriented, as the group trades in space rock for a more conventional blues-rock sound…