{"id":29830,"date":"2025-08-04T05:30:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-04T09:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=29830"},"modified":"2025-08-04T11:25:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-04T15:25:11","slug":"album-review-the-black-watch-for-all-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2025\/08\/04\/album-review-the-black-watch-for-all-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Album Review: The Black Watch \u2013 For All the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"\u201cCome on,\u201d I can almost hear you telling me. \u201cYou\u2019ve told us plenty of times that The Black Watch are prolific. Tell us something else.\u201d Fair enough. John Andrew Fredrick and his band mates have crafted yet another winning collection of songs with For All the World<\/i>. It\u2019s their eleventy-billionth<\/a> album, and most recent since the two albums they released last year, Weird Rooms<\/i><\/a> and Future Strangers<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Right out of the gate, \u201cMal de Mer\u201d washes over the listener with a sound that seamlessly combines shoegaze, alt-rock and ear-candy pop. The touchstones I\u2019ve mentioned in connection with The Black Watch in past reviews all apply here, but mentioning them again by name is (a) redundant and (b) likely to distract potential listeners from the band\u2019s originality, a quality it has in spades.<\/p>\n

On second thought, \u201cSurely You Rally\u201d will remind some of The Cure crossed with The Teardrop Explodes. And hey, that\u2019s wonderful. The driving bass lines of the song \u2013 one of The Black Watch\u2019s trademark sonic values — draws the listener in and holds \u2018em firm. Yet despite mention of any number of \u201880s acts as reference points overlooks the important fact that this music feels timeless. It could have come out years ago (and you just somehow missed it) or it could be brand-new. As it happens, the latter is true.<\/p>\n

Few bands are as deft and applying atonal, skronky lead guitar lines to catchy melodies, with the result the kind of thing that can please fans of either or both styles. Fredrick manages to pack a brief rave-up into even the briefest of tunes. The album is stuffed with shimmering melancholy pop like \u201cNot For Us,\u201d dancefloor \u201880s-ish gems like \u201cIn the Dark\u201d and sophisticated art rock like the sweeping \u201cAchilles Past.\u201d<\/p>\n

Put yet another way, and to save a bit of time, anyone who has enjoyed even one of The Black Watch\u2019s previous releases may well find that For All the World<\/i> is superior even to that. All others are encouraged to check it out as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cCome on,\u201d I can almost hear you telling me. \u201cYou\u2019ve told us plenty of times that The Black Watch are prolific. Tell us something else.\u201d Fair enough. John Andrew Fredrick […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29831,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,62,65],"tags":[3921],"class_list":["post-29830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-release","category-rawk","category-review","tag-the-black-watch","cat-49-id","cat-62-id","cat-65-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29830"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29861,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29830\/revisions\/29861"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}