Making Time: A Shel Talmy Production

Various artists

Because only four or five of these 25 Shel Talmy–produced tracks will be familiar to the casual ’60s-rock fan, most of them may as well be new. Well, not “new” exactly—they do sound as if they were produced in the ’60s. But Talmy sure had an ear for catchy tunes whether folk (Pentangle), proto-girl band (Goldie and the Gingerbreads), British Invasion (Manfred Mann), or Mexican Invasion (Trini Lopez). And he knew how to make sure that, even coming from an AM radio, they’d register.

Goths

The Mountain Goats

John Darnielle specializes in finding the universal in the particular, usually particular fringe dwellers. The last time, he sang about wrestlers, this time about those bands and their fans who became notorious in the ’80s for looking like vampire-film extras. He takes their measure from various unsentimental yet sympathetic points of view, some first-person, some third, and he’s seldom less than tuneful. He even lets middling arena rockers (whom goth rendered marginal) and woodwinds (which, for this album anyway, have replaced the guitars) have their say.

God’s Problem Child

Willie Nelson

The laid-back demeanor is camouflage. If Nelson didn’t mean business, he wouldn’t have corralled Buddy Cannon to help him write seven of these 13 songs—his latest classics (“Your Memory Has a Mind of Its Own,” “It Gets Easier,” “I Made a Mistake”) and a great joke (“Still Not Dead”) among them. He also wouldn’t have solicited the fear-and-trembling title cut from Jamey Johnson and Tony Joe White or let each of them and Leon Russell sing a verse. They’re no Highwaymen, but they’ll do.

Jon Savage’s 1967: The Year Pop Divided

Various artists

The operative term in this compilation’s title isn’t “Pop,” “Divided,” or “1967” but “Jon Savage’s.” Savage, a British music journalist, liked these songs as a teenager, and, yes, he had good taste. Even without the Beatles, the Beach Boys, or the Stones (licensing fees?), he has managed to find 48 exciting, 50-year-old hits and obscurities that, the Mickey Finn’s Hendrix rip-off aside, sound not only good together but also better together than they would in any other easily imaginable context except maybe Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets.

Encore

In the United States, the Move was mainly a footnote to the band it morphed into, the Electric Light Orchestra. But in their native England, Roy Wood, Bev Bevan, and Carl Wayne (the Move’s core) were, from 1966 to 1972, pop-chart mainstays. The 76 minutes of music on the recently released Magnetic Waves of Sound: The Best of the Move (Esoteric) and the accompanying DVD of vintage Move TV performances (both live and lip-synced) make fathoming their popularity easy.

What the discs don’t clarify is why the group didn’t catch on stateside. Was it its lack of an obvious frontman? (Almost every member sang lead at one time or another, often in the same song.) Its eclectic knotting of incipient art rock with strands of British Invasion and American pop? Probably both—and the members’ refusal to take themselves or their music too seriously just as their Woodstock Generation contemporaries in the United States were refusing not to. —A.O.