The Fleshtones ♦ Southern Culture on the Skids ♦ Los Straitjackets

Mondo Zombie Boogaloo

Yep Roc

Gathering up three like-minded purveyors of ’60s-style garage/surf/rockabilly artists from its roster, Yep Roc pulls off an A1 celebration of a musically overlooked time of year: Halloween. Amid the parade of  Christmas albums that seemingly starts earlier each year, “Mondo Zombie Boogaloo” is a refreshing jolt of originals and standards that’ll bring anyone’s monster to life.

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Jonny Kaplan and the Lazy Stars

Sparkle and Shine

Reckless Grace

Jonny Kaplan has toiled in obscurity stateside since independently releasing his 1997 debut, “California Heart” — arguably one of the best latter-day country-rock albums to come out of Los Angeles.

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Rick Shea

Sweet Bernardine

Tres Pescadores

Rick Shea ranks alongside Dave Alvin and the late Chris Gaffney in the Southern California roots-rock movement, which morphed out of the Los Angeles country-rock movement in the 1980s by taking on a Southwestern folk edge. Over the years, in fact, the three have played on each other’s albums and toured together intermittently as Dave Alvin and the Guilty Men.

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various artists

The Big E:
A Salute to Steel Guitarist Buddy Emmons

MPI

Buddy Emmons backed up singers and recorded his own instrumental pedal steel guitar albums, so it’s logical for this excellent tribute — funded via Kickstarter and the production school Music Producers Institute — to contain nine vocal and nearly seven instrumental numbers (Greg Leisz’s 5½-minute take on “Wild Mountain Thyme” features a minute-long vocal passage toward the end).

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Nilsson

The RCA Albums Collection

RCA/Legacy

Brother bought a coconut; he bought it for a dime.
His sister had another one, she paid it for a lime.
She put the lime in the coconut; she drank ’em both up …

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