Aztec Camera's Anniversay Release

Domino will be releasing of the 30th anniversary edition of Aztec Camera's classic debut album, High Land, Hard Rain in North America on February 4th.

With the original album remastered from the analog tapes and the CD package full of all sorts of super rare nuggets (many not available before digitally). High Land, Hard Rain and the rarities are streaming now via Pitchfork Advance.

Contemporary with fellow Glaswegians Orange Juice, Aztec Camera made their debut on vinyl with the release of the "Just Like Gold" single on the seminal Postcard label when Frame was only 16 years old.

Another single followed on Postcard with "Mattress Of Wire" before the band made their move to the more firmly established Rough Trade label to record their debut album, High Land, Hard Rain (released in North America on Sire Records).

The album opens with the exuberant pop of "Oblivious," one of the enduring songs of its decade, which very nearly became Rough Trade's first UK Top 40 hit in the early days of 1983 (Fear not, the song's re-issue on WEA later that year would drive it into the Top 20 eventually). Follow-up single "Walk Out To Winter" is yet another tour-de-force of pop songwriting, as well as showcasing Frame's prodigious talents as a guitarist.

Frame re-visited the Postcard b-side "We Could Send Letters" to end side one. A sweeping dramatic masterpiece of heartache and yearning, it is easily one of his most beloved compositions to this day.

In his new liner notes for this edition, Rolling Stone's David Fricke calls High Land, Hard Rain "ten songs of anxious yearning, romantic urgency, big hurt and hard-won learning, distilled into compact dramas of buckskin-folk jangle and skewed-pop elegance." We call it the one of the greatest debut albums in the history of rock 'n' roll.

That it was written and conceived by the group's EIGHTEEN YEAR OLD mastermind, well that just defies all logic and sense of fair play.