LUNCH TIME

“NO FREE LUNCH.” Green on Red. Mercury. This is better than a free lunch: seven first-rate tunes, including an inspired reading of the Willie Nelson nugget “Funny How Time Slips Away.” There’s a down-home simplicity to numbers like “Ballad of Guy Fawkes” and “Honest Man” that recalls an earlier rock era yet sounds completely right in 1986--this stuff is timeless , rather than dated. “Jimmy Boy” spins a dark yarn in such an understated, absorbing way that when Dan Stuart seemingly transposes words (“. . . He had his cut throat like a trout”) you go along with it. You just wish there were more than seven songs here to go along with.