Mike Mettler

Talk about peaking at the exact right time. Scottish art-rockers Simple Minds had just hit their stride with February 1984's transitional Sparkle in the Rain and scored an unexpected No. 1 single in the summer of 1985 with the Breakfast Club soundtrack-only smash hit "Don't You (Forget About Me)"—and it was all precursor to the production power that propelled their October 1985 longplayer, Once Upon a Time, into one of the biggest albums of the MTV Decade.

Can it really be 20 full years since singer/songwriter/piano ingenue Norah Jones burst on the scene with her stunning, multiple-Grammy Award-winning February 2002 debut album, Come Away With Me? This breakthrough album is currently being properly feted with a 20th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition that contains bonus tracks galore, but the immediate impact of its lead-track sensation “Don’t Know Why” is what sealed Jones as the real deal in the first place—and it mesmerizes the ears (and soul) even more fully in its Dolby Atmos incarnation.

Spoiler alert: Rush’s February 1981 masterpiece, Moving Pictures, is my personal No. 1 favorite album of all time, so I was very much looking forward to hearing the entire album in its full glory in Atmos. Interestingly, stellar Atmos mixes of two great Pictures tracks, “Tom Sawyer” and “Limelight,” were released last year on Apple Music in anticipation of celebrating the album’s 40th anniversary, but the balance of its seven tracks were held back until now, mostly due to supply-chain issues in order to align with the physical release of the Moving Pictures Super Deluxe Edition box set that finally came to market earlier this month—a mondo-disc collection that features a 24-bit/96kHz Atmos mix of the entire album on its included Blu-ray.

The seven-man band then known as Chicago Transit Authority were at the forefront of the horn-driven jazz-rock movement when they emerged in April 1969 with their self-titled double-length debut album, thanks in no small part to the knob-turning efforts of their semi-Svengali producer James William Guercio.