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...

Roddy Frame, the Scottish singer/songwriter behind Aztec Camera, has always been precocious: By 17, he was recording New Wave folk with the verbal sophistication of a baby Wordsworth; by 23, he had reinvented himself as a slick blue-eyed soul man from the Northlands; and now, before hitting 30, he's fallen into the middle-aged quagmire of irrelevance.

That's not to say that Dreamland, his fifth...

High Land, Hard Rain, the debut album by Aztec Camera, is the kind of pop record you were afraid they didn't make anymore. Fear not automatic-pilot drum machines and humorlessly percolating synthesizers. Young singer-songwriter-guitarist Roddy Frame's anxious boyish tenor and shy romantic melodies are instead stirred by the wind-chine strumming of acoustic guitars, gently draped over simple rhythm...