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.
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.
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.
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).
