tracks on LP: Oblivious | The Boy Wonders | Walk Out To Winter | The Bugle Sounds Again | We Could Send Letters | Pillar To Post | Release | Lost Outside The Tunnel | Back On Board | Down The Dip
Record label: Rough Trade ROUGH 47
Released: 15/04/83
Purchased: 16/04/83
WHERE OTHER practitioners of ‘soft’ rock are content to be mellow, Aztec Camera are passionately exact. Tossed by great emotion, by all the confusions of love, Aztec Camera strive to capture and contain their delights and torments.
Aztec Camera have the edge missing from the work of contemporaries like Ben Watt and The Gist. The edge comes from the tension Roddy’s songs between great feeling and careful craft. Roddy holds emotions in check in order to suggest their force. It is not enough to be merely quiet.
Frame’s miniatures are sculptured to describe their subjects to perfection. This, Aztec Camera’s debut album, has been four years in the making and is anything but careless. For years AC have searched for a production that could create a balanced tension between the delicacy of Frame’s melodies and their need for a firm beat. Here, they’ve found it. At last songs like “We Could Send Letters” have the drama they deserve. For the first time, all the moods in Frame’s songs are shown in their full colours. The results are, simply, gorgeous.
Frame may include sixties ‘posts’ like Paul Simon amongst his mentors but he is no throwback to that period. Unlike them, Frame is a pop writer whose songs are essentially teenage, capturing the hesitancies and rushes of feeling of those first loves. So songs like “Walk Out To Winter” rush with a sense of a journey begun, Roddy’s craft holds it in check and so describes the longing perfectly.
10 songs then, none of them a miss. Frame’s guitar work is superb throughout. If his voice occasionally lacks the character of the songs.
Aztec Camera make you realise how slapdash are Roddy’s contemporaries. These songs trace the twists and turns of moods that matter. ++++ (Record Mirror, 09/04/83)
Aztec Camera | High Land, Hard Rain | Rough Trade 1983
It’s taken Aztec Camera four years to make an LP but this collection of 10 classic songs was worth the wait. Roddy Frame’s versatile acoustic guitar work and forceful vocals inject a rare spirit into his songs. The single “Oblivious”, contrasts with some moodier ballads that smoulder with a soulful intensity. (8 out of 10) (Smash Hits, April 1983)
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