Knife is Aztec Camera’s second album and the first major indication of the instinctive contrariness that would characterise Roddy Frame’s career from this point on: having established himself, with the astonishing debut High Land, Hard Rain, as about the hippest star in the firmament, Frame offered the producer’s role here to Mark Knopfler a man, then as ever, roughly as fashionable as brown corduroy trousers. The results proved, and not for the last time, that the still-teenage Frame’s judgement was several leaps ahead of received wisdom. Knife, though electric where its revered predecessor was acoustic, polished where High Land, Hard Rain had been endearingly ramshackle, is a fine and much under-rated album. The opening track, "Still On Fire" helps itself to the riff from the Jackson Five’s "I Want You Back" on its way to becoming one of Frame’s best singles; elsewhere, the ballads "Just Like the USA" and "Head Is Happy (Heart’s Insane)" confirm that the hyperbole then being directed at Roddy Frame was, if anything, understated. --Andrew Mueller
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