Arista

The British singer's U.S. breakthrough album is surprisingly durable 15 years after its release. With Stansfield's dusky voice and the tracks' Barry White production fetish, Affection rose well above post-disco hackery. The single "All Around the World" is still great to get horizontal to.

This article appears in Nov 9-15, 2005.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...