Music for small groups of players has flourished since the Baroque era. Whether composed for a consort of viols, a string quartet, or even a group of unconventional instruments, the genre is known as chamber music, which has been a staple of classical listening for more than 400 years.

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Alcoholic Faith Mission's recently released Ask Me This is a raucous, emotional, and quite often thrilling, record that finds the Danish group pitched somewhere between a less-pompous Arcade Fire and a supremely bummed-out I'm From Barcelona. It's the band's fourth album and they've got their intense but melodic sound just about perfected, espcially on the uptempo tracks that burst through the speakers in a rush of melancholy fever. We asked them for a list that reflected their current interests and as you can see, they like to drink whisky!!

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If any year captured the heady rush of the early '80s, it was 1983, the year Michael Jackson's Thriller became a phenomenon and, not coincidentally, the year of MTV's prime. The cable network debuted two years earlier but '83 was when music videos took over, popping up on cable channels and network TV, and along with videos came a glorious period of hit singles by one-hit wonders, new invaders from Britain, and veterans who now mastered synths and drum machines, the latter inexplicably led by grizzled, hairy blues-rockers ZZ Top and the visionary jazz-fusion keyboardist Herbie Hancock. Underneath all this televised glitz were some major debuts: the first albums from Madonna, Metallica, R.E.M., and Husker Du, and the first singles from the Smiths and Run-D.M.C. And there were the mammoth hits -- yes, Thriller, but also Def Leppard's Pyromania and the Police's Synchronicity, all giving us more than enough reason to love 1983.

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