Spanning 21 luminescent tracks, the new double album ‘For All The World’ is a magnificent journey through the fertile imagination of John Andrew Frederick and his band the black watch. The common theme throughout is the ear for indelible catchy melodies, infused with a sparkling melancholia and shimmering instrumentation.
Incredibly, it is the black watch’s twenty-fifth album – a testimony to the firm hand on the tiller by Frederick but also the well worn description of his prolific capacity for songwriting – a capacity that is not diluted or diminished over that time or over the tracks of this double album.
Having recorded 2024’s Weird Rooms with producer Misha Bullock and Fredrick’s son Chandler at Bullock’s studio in Austin, TX, the TBW founder was keen to repeat the experience with, he says, more straightforward, classic psych/jangle/shoegaze songs. The result, though artistically satisfying, spurred a yen in John to write more songs as a sort of reaction against the batch he’d carried with him from LA to Texas.
We had such a productive time recording ‘Weird Rooms’ that I wanted to repeat the experience… without repeating the experience. And once it was over and I left Misha to do what he pleased with respect to mixing and overdubbing, all I could think was ‘I need to write another album now.’
The sounds range from a very antipodean Flying Nun jingle jangle (see for example ‘Surely You Rally’, ‘Not For Us’ and ‘In The Dark’) to folkish ballads such as ‘The Hook Stuck’.
‘Lord Marchpane’ has a sixties Byrdsian shimmer while ‘Effective Forthwith’ has a high-stepping pace and a motorik beat, redolent of any good pop song by bands like James but with a slight twist that makes one think of early Pink Floyd.
And throughout you can detect the genetic evidence of The Beatles – indeed Fredrick has in the press often cleverly/self-deprecatingly remarked that his ambition with every TBW album has been to:
…make a record on a par with ‘The White Album’. I think Misha said at one point: ‘Here you have a nice balance of quite weird songs and quite poppy ones – though it’s up for a sort of debate as there’s a lot of weird in the poppy and poppy in the weird ones.’
Single ‘Achilles Past’ has the trademark jingle jangle dream pop sound that permeates the track along with Frederick’s deep timbre, the yearning, melancholic melodies and the cinematic, wide-screen scope of the instrumentation. Frederick says of the track:
It’s about, as the first line of the song hints, temptation and how sometimes, not always – we can’t avoid it, notwithstanding our best intentions!
It is a majestic track imbued with a certain enchanting presence. The accompanying video is a fascinating assembly of iconic imagery interspersed with shots of Frederick:
Time simply precludes a track by track analysis of this cornucopia of shimmering sound and delicate delivery but suffice to say every song is a stunning and visceral display of Frederick’s extraordinary songwriting skills – melodies that soar, a sound that is rich and textured and lyrics that shine.
Frederick says of his songwriting:
I know that songs just pour out of me; songwriting is a great, sometimes frustrating, but mostly fun endeavor. It’s exciting. It counterbalances the other part of my life where I sit around comparing translations of Tolstoy and Proust and Dostoevsky. There are many bands, by the by- other than the Beatles – that I cherish, and many more I greatly loathe, which is a bit motivating. And moreover I’m in love with making music.
And we certainly are the beneficiaries of his musical journey.
Read our review of The Black Watch’s ‘Weird Rooms’ released last year.
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