Aztec Camera

Adding production duties from Mark Knopfler and atmospheric keyboards may have expanded the sound of Aztec Camera's second record, but it lacks the immediacy of their first. That said, there are gems on the record in the form of tracks "Backwards and Forwards" and "All I Need Is Everything."

Roddy Frame, the twenty-year-old singer/songwriter behind Scotland's Aztec Camera, has
a coltish exuberance for words that sometimes outruns his skill at writing them down. But
when he's inspired, Frame's songs are gracefully gangling. On his quartet's 1983 debut, High
Land, Hard Rain, he guilelessly portrayed a new generation of U.K. youth crawling from
punk's wreckage to view its bleak national landscape with undaunted hope and... More >

Given the putrefaction potential of the straightforwardly literary romanticism Roddy Frame affects, it's amazing he did so brilliantly with it even once. In fact, it's fairly amazing that second time out he gets away with it three songs' worth--three songs whose verbal lyricism sharpens the consistently winsome music, which is the kind of unlikely feat critics expect of straightforwardly literary types. Silly though it seems, Frame may be right to worry that his youth is passing at twenty-one, unless you want to blame the five merely winsome songs on producer Mark Knopfler, who probably thought "Here lies the essence of my peers" a deep line and certainly cheered "Knife" on to nine minutes. (Grade - B+)