February 10, 2014

Aztec Camera’s First Album: So Good, It’s Hard to Believe a Teenager Wrote It

Courtesy of Motormouthmedia

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Aztec Camera
High Land, Hard Rain
Domino

It’s hard to believe Scotland’s Roddy Frame was a teenager when he released the first Aztec Camera album three decades ago. The bittersweet yet buoyant acoustic pop of the immensely appealing High Land, Hard Rain feels like the testimony of a well-traveled soul, mixing remarkably cliché-free tales of romantic travail with catchy, deceptively sophisticated melodies.

Frame’s restraint may be the most impressive thing about this luminous work: Radiant, big-hearted tunes like “Oblivious” and “Walk Out to Winter” could easily be repurposed as sprawling mass-appeal (i.e., cheesy) epics, but his thoughtful attention to detail produces more-believable vignettes that cut deep. This reissue augments the original 10-track album with a bonus disc of 16 rarities—extra songs, live versions, and remixes—none of them essential, but all worth hearing.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

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