You've Got to Be Loved

The Montanas' complete Pye Records recordings are assembled on this 26-song compilation, which is one of the more self-consciously beautiful bodies of music that one is likely to cross paths with from mid-'60s England. A middleweight outfit from England's Midlands, their sound was a kind of high-energy pop/rock, with chiming guitars and seriously elegant and robust harmonies, somewhere midway between, say, the Hollies and the Ivy League. Opening with the slightly tongue-tied title "All That Is Mine Can Be Yours" and "How Can I Tell" — both crossing the Everly Brothers with the Beatles of "I Need You" — the material here generally runs toward fairly punchy beats, chiming rhythm guitars, and high harmonies. They also occasionally stepped outside of those boundaries, most notably on the fuzz-laden A-side "That's When Happiness Began," a frantic, emphatic piece of harmony-based freakbeat/garage rock, and "Anyone There," a Monkees-like piece of zaniness complete with tinkling piano and fuzztone guitar. By 1967, they'd evolved a bright sunshine pop sound that, had they been based in America on a reasonably strong label, might've had them breathing down the necks of the Association, and "Take My Hand" (authored by the Addrisi Brothers) even sounds like a lost record by the latter group. "You've Got to Be Loved," an even more pop-oriented single complete with horn accompaniment, made it to the U.S. Top 100 singles, despite the fact that neither the band nor anyone directly connected with them ever promoted it in America. The last ten tracks on this collection (two of them instrumentals awaiting vocals) were unreleased until the late '90s, three decades after they were recorded — they mostly come out of the same place as "Take My Hand" and "You've Got to Be Loved," though they lack some of their invention.