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 wonder: "So here we go, digging through those dustbins, giving things new names." While Frame's lyrics were all joie de vivre, however, his cocktail-lounge guitar and soft-rock melodies were all mush. Producer Mark Knopfler has enlivened Knife some: the album shares the vibrant rusticity – lolling piano codas and bracing guitar picking – of Knopfler's Local Hero soundtrack.

There are two standouts on the album. The sunny "Still on Fire" urges optimism and resiliency even "when the strongest words have all been used and all the new ones sound confused," its hopscotch rhythm guitars itching to break into the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back." On "Just Like the USA," Frame redeems a grandiose metaphor (equating his misused energy with that of the American government) in a charming, self-deprecating vocal and feisty Duane Eddy riffing. But Knife is mostly a drag – muddled, unwieldy lyrics and musical inertia. The record needs more of the boyish audacity that fueled Frame's loping acoustic version of Van Halen's "Jump," the nonalbum B side of "All I Need Is Everything." He may yet live up to his boy-wonder hype, but here Frame sounds like he's gone prematurely gray. (RS 439)

JOYCE MILLMAN