(FORTUNE Magazine) – The Avalanches Since I Left You Modular Recordings/Sire

The Avalanches fall into the dance-music category, but they wiggle free of all those mechanized squeaks and pings. Instead, these Australians manage to reinvent the twinkly, swoony, sweaty, rump-bumping daze of the disco years. In an age of anxiety, such rampant bliss is hard to resist.

Robert Earl Keen Gravitational Forces Lost Highway

Here's an album with the plain, clean beauty of a Windsor chair. Meticulous carpentry has undoubtedly gone into each track, but all of this veteran Texas troubadour's sawing and sanding remains invisible, leaving you with music as sturdy as it is sublime.

Snoop Doggy Dogg Death Row's Greatest Hits Death Row Records

Snoop has a voice like hollandaise sauce: buttery, luxurious, and very bad for you. Nearly ten years after his breakthrough, it's that voice--spiced with a dash of Snoop's unflappable West Coast charisma--that gives songs like "Gin & Juice" a chronic slot in the hip-hop pantheon.

Vasen Live at the Nordic Roots Festival NorthSide

If a bluegrass band decided to do a fiddle-mad version of Brain Salad Surgery, or if Rush developed a fetish for ancient Viking fugues, the result might sound something like the rococo hoedown of Vasen, a Swedish quartet hailed as the "fab four" of Nordic roots music.

Bill Frisell Bill Frisell With Dave Holland and Elvin Jones Nonesuch

Frisell plays guitar like a ghost; he makes the instrument chime, purl, and vaporize as if the strings were floating in the ozone layer. Linked up with a legendary rhythm section, his music gets a steam-engine locomotion that renders it both ethereal and earthy--and totally hypnotic.