What Old Music Blew Your Mind in 2024?
For me, it was the eclectic ’80s indie pop band Aztec Camera
In the introduction to my year-end list this week, I mentioned that I spend at least as much time learning about new-to-me old music as I do keeping up with stuff that’s actually new. I know I’m not alone in my fondness for crate-digging, either literal or digital, which inspired this week’s Sound Off question: What’s your favorite old music you discovered in 2024?
I got a little obsessed with artsy UK indie pop from the 1980s this year. Along the way, I encountered what is now one of my favorite bands of all time: Aztec Camera, which is really more like the solo project of Scottish singer-songwriter Roddy Frame, with a rotating cast of musicians backing him. Frame was sort of a prodigy: When Aztec Camera’s first single came out in 1981, he was 16 years old. In those early days, they were a jangly and literary post-punk outfit with roots deep in the underground. But Frame had other ambitions. Over the course of the band’s 15-year run, he flirted with slick synth-pop, plush R&B, and drizzly trip-hop, collaborating with figures as divergent as Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, Mick Jones of the Clash, NYC electro pioneer Michael Jonzun, and Japanese electronic-music legend Ryuichi Sakamoto.
It seems that many people consider still consider High Land, Hard Rain, Aztec Camera’s scrappily precocious 1983 debut, to be their finest hour, and the subsequent records as the work of a talented songwriter who lost sight of what made him great in his search for a pop crossover, dabbling in various sounds but never finding one that suited him as well as the original. I think that’s exactly wrong. Frame’s songwriting—full of joyful melodic inventions, sly turns of phrase, strangely arresting images, raw pleas for compassion—only deepened as he grew up. He is both a pure singer-songwriter in the post-Dylan tradition and a crowd-pleasing pop tunesmith; and the greatness of the Aztec Camera catalog lies partly in his efforts to reconcile these two apparently divergent impulses, to make them coexist, as the pop landscape changes dramatically around him.
There was plenty of other old music I loved this year, but none felt so comfortable, so easy to love, so quickly and thoroughly like a part of me, as Aztec Camera. Let us know your picks in the comments.
