Dancing Behind Your Eyelids

Top/ "Otherworldly pop songs, both magnificently ambitious and engagingly intimate. Breathtaking panoramas of sound with few clear antecedents. This is music with no boundaries": Magic Chairs is the third studio album from Danish indie pop-rock group Efterklang. The album is the band's first release on their new label 4AD, and was released on February 22, 2010 and a day later in North America. The name Efterklang comes from the Danish word for "remembrance" or "reverberation." Formed in Copenhagen, its four core members are: Casper Clausen, Mads Brauer, Thomas Husmer, and Rasmus Stolberg. Efterklang released their first album Tripper to warm critical acclaim in autumn 2004. Their second album Parades, released in October 2007, was released to widespread critical acclaim. Bottom/ In September 2008, Efterklang and The Danish National Chamber Orchestra performed Parades in its entirety at the Copenhagen Concert Hall; the performance was documented on a limited edition LP/DVD set entitled Performing Parades. Nan Na Hvass from Hvass&Hannibal is the mastermind behind the critically-acclaimed artwork for Efterklang's One-Sided LP, Under Giant Trees, Parades and the "Mirador" music video, and Magic Chair.

Suddenly Is Sooner Than You Think

#1 Record is the debut album by the American power pop group Big Star. It was released in 1972 by Memphis-based Ardent Records. Though many critics praised the album's elegant vocal harmonies and refined songcraft (frequently drawing comparisons to the British Invasion groups of the 1960s, including The Beatles and The Kinks, as well as The Byrds, The Beach Boys, and other U.S. acts), #1 Record fared quite dismally in terms of commercial success. To the resulting power pop, Big Star added dark, nihilistic themes, and produced a style that foreshadowed the alternative rock of the 1980s and 1990s. However, like Big Star's follow-up albums Radio City and Third/Sister Lovers, #1 Record has more recently attracted wider attention. R.E.M.'s Peter Buck admitted, "We've sort of flirted with greatness, but we've yet to make a record as good as Revolver or Highway 61 Revisited or Exile on Main Street or Big Star's Third." Parke Putterbaugh of Rolling Stone described Third/Sister Lovers as "extraordinary". It is, he wrote, "Chilton's untidy masterpiece. [...] beautiful and disturbing"; "vehemently original"; of "haunting brilliance". In addition to R.E.M., artists including Teenage Fanclub, The Replacements, Primal Scream and the Posies cite Big Star as an inspiration. In 1998, #1 Record's "In the Street" was used as the theme song for the sitcom That '70s Show. Big Star was formed in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1971 by Alex Chilton, Chris Bell, Jody Stephens and Andy Hummel. The group broke up in 1974, but reorganized with a new line-up nearly 20 years later. Before it broke up, Big Star created a "seminal body of work that never stopped inspiring succeeding generations" in the words of Rolling Stone, earning recognition decades later, according to Allmusic, as the "quintessential American power pop band" and "one of the most mythic and influential cult acts in all of rock & roll". Chilton died on 17 March 2010, after being admitted to hospital with heart problems. Performing as lead singer with blue-eyed soul group The Box Tops from 1967 to 1970 earned him the #1 hit "The Letter" at the age of sixteen.

On The Wires Of Our Nerves

Bottom/Avant Hard (Mute, 1999) is the third album by Add N To (X). Add N to (X) were a three-piece British band specializing in electronic music performed on analogue synthesizers, formed in London in 1994. After several releases on small labels, they turned down offers from major labels and signed to large independent label Mute Records in 1998, and achieved a modest commercial success before splitting in 2003. Second album On the Wires of Our Nerves was described as "like Stereolab/Suicide with a rocket shoved up their rectum". The album was played heavily by BBC Radio 1 DJ Mary Ann Hobbs on her show, The Breezeblock. The group performed live regularly, often augmenting their core three-piece line up with either one or two acoustic drummers, and sometimes additional musicians playing extra synths and/or electric guitar. Other albums by the band include Add Insult to Injury and Loud Like Nature. Top/ Cover pic for "Plug Me In" (Mute, 2000) was borrowed from Curious Magazine circa 1972. Add N to (X) often utilized distinctive artwork for the videos and record sleeves, a fetishistic collage of sexual imagery with analogue electronic equipment, based in part on the movie and book Demon Seed. Most of the group's songs and video clips have been adult/sex-related; the video for "Metal Fingers in My Body" is an animated short where a female is having sex with a robot, and their video for "Plug Me In" is famous for featuring porn actresses playing with sex toys.

Tickets To What You Need

Top/ Following the success of his early EPs, Damon Gough (stage name Badly Drawn Boy)'s debut album, The Hour of Bewilderbeast (XL Recordings/Twisted Nerve Records), was released in June 2000, accompanied by four singles. The album featured members of Alfie and Doves as backing musicians. In 2002, Gough returned to score the film adaptation of Nick Hornby's novel About a Boy. His third album, Have You Fed the Fish?, introduced more guitars and an increasingly mainstream pop sound which was not welcomed by all critics. The album is a play on Gough's minor celebrity status and namechecks fellow musicians such as Madonna and John Lennon. Another three singles, including "All Possibilities" (Twisted Nerve, 2003) and "Born Again" accompanied the album. Badly Drawn Boy is a Mercury Prize-winning rock singer/songwriter. He was born on October 2, 1969, in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, England. A supporter of Manchester City Football Club, Gough is a Bruce Springsteen, Jeff Buckley and Pixies fan. He is parodied in the adult comic Viz as "Badly Overdrawn Boy", a pop singer who fails to sell any records and resorts to busking outside his local bank. Bottom/ Killer soundtrack for the 1996 action-comedy-horror film, From Dusk Till Dawn, directed by Robert Rodriguez and written by Quentin Tarantino. The album (Sony, 1996) is predominantly Texas blues, featuring such artists as ZZ Top, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimmie Vaughan. The Chicano rock band Tito & Tarantula, who portrayed the band in the Titty Twister bar, appears on the soundtrack as well.