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Album Review
by SashaS
4-9-2002
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| Roddy Frame's urbane-surfing |
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Roddy Frame: 'Surf'
(Cooking Vinyl)
Roddy Frame’s ‘Surf’ is his intimately best
If I were Roddy Frame I’d be mightily miffed off with the lack of recognition so deserved for such a long time. But no, he still makes music as gentle as a breeze over a loch, as deep as Nessie’s supposed aqua-kingdom, as uplifting as a view from a mountain peak, as substantial as Scottish rains in winter… Many a lesser man – and that’s why I’m only a mere reviewer – would have turned into a cynical wreck whose bile could only poison songs…
Accompanied solely on guitar, Frame delivers songs of the most intimate nature, stripped down of all its excess, just cutting through the personal battlefield’s we know as relationships, melody carried in a vocal with ease and appealingly, that astonishes with its warmth and range during a course of dissecting situations with a scalpel of a diploma’d tone-surgeon.
From the opening ‘Over You’, Frame moves over different moods while keeping it simple and pure without clattering songs with anything additional. This is an acoustic and completely solo work on the singer/songwriter’s second solo albums. He’s had another five with his band Aztec Camera, spreading from the early 1980s to 1995.
This is truly one-man show that allows for artist to freely explore his feelings, open up his mind and soul, letting creativity take him where collaborators and bands would otherwise impose limitations and interfere. These 11 songs are certainly very personal and voiced in the finest possible manner: his vox-box is clear, emotive and soulful to the extent you wonder why this man is not at albums’ No.1 instead of Coldplay!?
There is elegance in tunes like ‘High Class Music’, certain nobility in ‘Turning The World Around’, a sense of grandeur in ‘Mixed Up Love’… ‘Surf’ exhibits wistfulness, it digs into all human emo-issues, as well as having great audacity to present naked emotions to an ever-increasing army of pink-robots that consume more than consummate.
It is incredible what a guitar and voice can supply when fuelled by right inspirations. It simply confirms that whatever else you try, however much you camouflage inadequacy, distract with gimmicks and lavish decor, near-nude dresses and choreography, you can’t beat quality of song. And here, there is abundance…
SashaS
4-9-2002
Roddy Frame’s ‘Surf’ is released 02 September 2002 on Cooking Vinyl
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