THERE are so many mentions of weather in Frame’s first solo release for eight years that it’s not difficult to wonder whether the album is a barometer for a man new to his fifties.

The advance into that decade has taken the troubadour into the sort of territory where rain, frost and blue skies are the backdrop to an outlook not altogether sun-dappled. As the Manics said in last year’s startling album Rewind The Frame, “I hate middle age”.

Fellow contemporary, and former Aztec Camera founder, Frame might not be at the point of abject hatred, but the sentiment is similar on an album that only occasionally sears.

After an opening two tracks – White Pony and Postcard recalling the AOR of Andrew Gold and Fleetwood Mac – the album livens up with Into The Sun, a paean to uncertainty in which Frame starts to doubt true love. It’s an emotive, almost David Bowie vocal – think of Wild Is The Wind – and includes the touching line “erase all trace of me til I’m just a piece of paper”. The emphasis on that last word is so elongated as to induce a heart-breaking moment.

Frame’s lyrical articulateness holds sway in the bossa-nova beat of Rear View Mirror, where a spare drum track provides more forlorn musings on close connections, and the rare optimism of the quasi-salvationist Forty Days Of Rain.

The closest to former days of Aztec gold is On The Waves, a jaunty, almost singa-long choon, which belies another tale of fleeting but doomed love.

That Frame can meld succinct images with mellifluous music is never in doubt, especially with the closing From A Train. But a lack of overall spark denies Frame a sunburst of his own Year Of The Cat, that Al Stewart classic of the 1970s. Like a British summer, this is distinctly patchy.