The Sugarcubes The Great Crossover Potential (1998)

Here is the first recording ever of the so-called Press Celebrations Music of 1899. Sibelius subsequently reworked and rescored the music later that same year in what became the first set of the Scenes historiques, Op. 25 and Finlandia, Op. 26, but here we have the first opportunity of hearing Sibelius’s original thoughts, as well as the Prelude, and the two movements that remained in manuscript. They are the second tableau, ‘The Finns are baptised’, and the fifth, ‘The Great Unrest’ or ‘Hostility’, referring to the so-called Great Northern War that followed the Russian capture of Viipuri in 1710 and the subsequent decline of Swedish power.

There's a kind of beautifully perverse brilliance to the Pussycat Dolls. Not only are they a sextet who got their start as neo-burlesque dancers in Los Angeles, but they make no bones about being a gleefully manufactured dance-pop act. Open the booklet for their 2005 debut, PCD, and their artificiality is made clear: the first page reads "All lead and background vocals by Nicole Scherzinger," a former member of Eden's Crush, the failed prefab teen pop group assembled on the WB's pre-American Idol reality music show Popstars. There is no pretense that Kimberly, Carmit, Ashley, Melody, and Jessica are there for anything besides filling out the illusion that this is a real performing musical group and providing some serious eye candy for a group that is all about the visuals.