(FORTUNE Magazine) – Rodney Crowell The Houston Kid Sugar Hill Records

The Nashville Paradox again: The only country singers worth listening to are the ones who flip Nashville the bird. With this so-honest-it-hurts suite about the joys and scars of his Texas youth, Crowell joins Steve Earle and Guy Clark in the elite fraternity of luminous mavericks.

Tortoise Standards Thrill Jockey Records

It's not dance music, but it has the same propulsive throb. It's not jazz, but it chugs along with syncopated intricacy. It's not rock, but it rocks. A floating, chiming, tumbling symphony of aural textures and hues, Standards is best described as the sonic smorgasbord of the future.

Finding Forrester Music From the Motion Picture Columbia/Legacy

Here's a shock: Get past that cheesy shot of Sean Connery and you'll find an album crammed with volcanic freak-outs and spectral ruminations by giants like Miles Davis, Bill Frisell, and Ornette Coleman. Even the jazz-funk fusion stuff sounds cool, which must be a first.

Electric Light Orchestra Flashback Epic/Legacy

ELO's songs are AM-radio marzipan--exquisite bonbons sculpted and glazed to resemble the Beach Boys and the Beatles. They're also really hard to resist. As this triple-disk anthology proves, you just can't find orchestral pop sweetmeats as strange and succulent as "Livin' Thing" or "Mr. Blue Sky."

Oumou Sangare Ko Sira World Circuit/Nonesuch

Oumou Sangare comes from Mali, a nation whose music has a singular capacity for hypnosis. This 1993 landmark in African pop, recently rereleased, bobs and spins until you slowly find yourself spellbound, wailing along even if you don't understand the words.